Thomas Waite
Trident Code
To the men and women whose unstinting efforts to defend citizens against potentially devastating cyberattacks should be applauded every day.
IN 2014, THE PENTAGON RELEASED A REPORT ASSERTING DECISIVELY THAT CLIMATE CHANGE POSES AN IMMEDIATE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY, WITH INCREASED RISKS FROM TERRORISM, INFECTIOUS DISEASE, GLOBAL POVERTY, AND FOOD SHORTAGES.
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hageclass="underline" “Defense leaders must be part of this global discussion. We must be clear-eyed about the security threats presented by climate change, and we must be proactive in addressing them.”
We ignore this report — and the former defense secretary’s warning — at our peril.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Since the writing of Lethal Code, the world has witnessed an ever-increasing number of cyberattacks aimed at governments, corporations, and individuals. While the books in my Lana Elkins series are works of fiction, most of the cyberattack vulnerabilities and cyberwar scenarios are based on facts.
PROLOGUE
Dr. Brian Ahearn pulled into his four-door garage, taking the spacious slot reserved for his Beemer between his wife’s silver Mercedes SUV and his summer car, a yellow Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet. The perks, he reminded himself, of a job well done.
He cut his headlights and moved to click the big door shut, but stopped to look in his rearview mirror at the sunset’s startling rose tint, the color of blood on a microscope slide. Years ago, in his undergraduate days at Brown, Brian had looked at many of those red splotches before deciding that pre-med wasn’t for him.
And a fine move that had proved to be. He’d switched to computer engineering and found a job with a lot more challenge — and considerably less gore.
Until today.
But what did the chisel-chinned, sandy-haired Harvard professor know of grisliness as he watched the door roll down behind him? Nothing, in short.
At that very instant his ears began to ring. He paid no mind till it occurred to him — a very odd thought, he realized at once — that it might be the body’s own alarm system. A feral instinct trying to protect him, like the hairs on one’s neck coming alive under the insistent gaze of a stranger.
He was too much of a scientist to believe in a sixth sense, but too much of a husband and father to ignore it. He had to go into his house. Marla would be there. So would his four-year-old twin girls, the little loves of his life. It was pizza night, his daughters’ favorite. His, too, he pretended.
Right then he told himself to pretend that he was not afraid.
Open the damn door.
As he entered his access code into the garage’s security panel, he caught the comforting scent of roasting mozzarella and pizza dough.
“Hello, I’m home,” he called.
He hung up his coat, listening intently. He heard nothing, just the strange ringing in his ears. But four-year-olds are not silent. It’s not in their nature. Certainly not Eva or Erica, unless they were sleeping. And they wouldn’t be napping at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon. If they weren’t racing around, they would be watching the sixty-inch screen, or playing computer games, or imploring their mother to read to them. Something. Not this… absence.
The first cold drip of perspiration streaked down his spine. It was the only one he would notice.
“Marla,” he called out. “Eva, Erica?”
He rushed into their spacious kitchen, finding immediate relief in the custom pizza oven at work, offering its glassy view of the treat within.
Brian took a breath, freed now of his irrational fear, finding normalcy in pizza night proceeding apace. He hadn’t been that spooked since he was old enough to stop checking for a bogeyman under his bed.
Marla must have been giving them a bath. He looked at his watch again. Of course she is.
And on any other evening, she would have been.
He cracked the oven, sniffing the cheese and tomato sauce, oregano and basil, green peppers and mushrooms, and for the first few seconds the scents pleased him, making him feel as warm as the crust gently browning before his eyes.
Truth be told, Brian would have liked it even better if there were pepperoni on his pizza, even the vegan variety, although the latter would have been at odds with everything Marla had held dear about the family’s diet. She had always been firmly opposed to “priming” the girls for meat eating by offering them soy in any of its carnivorous impersonations.
He had to sneak his meat. He and a professor in MIT’s math department scooted off together for “Hamburger Wednesdays” at Tasty Burger in Harvard Square. Both their spouses would have considered their clandestine affairs with hamburgers to be culinary slumming. His midweek lunch was only one of many secrets Brian kept from Marla. He kept even more from his colleagues.
He turned from the oven and saw the chopping block wiped clean, just the way the fastidious Marla always left it… except for the cleaver with its thick dark handle. It lay a foot away with fresh red smears — worse, far worse, than anything he’d ever seen on a slide. Then he noticed the spatters on the counter and cabinets, so vivid he could not help imagining the red spray, as if the cleaver were at work right now. And there was Marla’s engagement diamond, in its exquisite setting, gleaming on the tile counter. Her gold band stood on its side inches away, as if awaiting her finger to slip inside.
Finger?
“Oh, no,” he murmured, for his eyes were roaming past the chopping block to the tile where Marla’s ring finger lay in a pool of blood.
His Adam’s apple moved. Only then did he realize he was fighting an eruption of bile. His hand slipped a Wüsthof chef knife from its polished wooden perch on the counter.
He wanted to back away, retreat through the door he’d just entered and run down the street. But he couldn’t: Marla, Eva, Erica.
Shamed by his own fright, Brian had to force himself to take the first step; already he felt sentenced to death.
Before reaching the living room, he spotted a tall bulky man in black overalls and a black ski mask standing on the inside of the wide passageway, and realized that he must have been watching him the entire time. Startled, Brian raised the knife.
The man shook his head patiently. Didn’t even point his black pistol at him. Didn’t need to. Brian simply dropped the blade. He was no match. He knew it even then. The point stuck in the floor and the handle shuddered, as if a sudden chill had swept through the house.
“Keep coming,” the gunman said.
Two more men, also masked and fully attired in black, sat forward on a long cinnamon-colored couch as Brian made his way past original oils by renowned contemporaries and over handloomed carpets that he and Marla had purchased on vacations in the Middle East and Asia.
He found his wife sitting between the pair of masked men. Her mouth was duct-taped, eyes wet and red. So was one of her bloody, gauze-covered hands. Brian realized she was in shock, pained beyond any bounds she had ever known.
He tried to rush to her side. The behemoth with the gun — trailing silently behind him — grabbed Brian’s arm. His strength was enormous.
“The girls?” Brian asked, terrified. He realized he was begging. The fear he’d known in the garage had returned — with good reason. “Where are they?”
No one answered. Not with words. Not yet.
The shorter of the two men on the couch rose, telling Brian to sit next to his wife. “Hold her hand.” It sounded like he was smiling. Brian couldn’t tell through the ski mask.