404: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  Music blared in the loft. The Black Eyed Peas. When we play you shake your ass. Shake it, shake it, shake it, girl. Make sure you don’t break it, girl.

  The FBI agents streamed through the 2,000-square-foot loft, visors down, weapons drawn.

  “Freeze,” Armstrong shouted through the music. “FBI. Put your hands on your head.”

  Decker could see H2O2 at his keyboard, framed by a triptych of monitors. He was a skinny kid in a dinosaur t-shirt, with a shaved head and the tattoo of a bug on the back of his neck. He was wearing a set of black headphones.

  “Clear,” someone shouted. “He’s alone.”

  “I said put your hands on your head!” Armstrong moved closer.

  It’s like playing a video game, Decker thought as the special agent leveled his carbine. A first person shooter. Except this is reality.

  “He isn’t responding,” said Ivanov.

  “I can see that,” said Decker.

  “No, I mean he’s still typing.” Ivanov pointed at the monitor with the Internet feed. “But on the cam, he’s just sitting there. See?”

  Armstrong finally stepped up to the suspect and poked him. H2O2’s head tipped to the side, his headphones slipped off, and a fountain of blood cascaded from a hole in his temple.

  The music blared on. Turn it up, turn it up. Turn it up, turn it up... One of the FBI agents touched the sound system and the loft fell suddenly silent.

  “He’s dead,” Armstrong said. He let go of the young hacker’s neck. His head slumped forward onto the keyboard. In the background, on all three of the monitors, the furious typing continued.

  “I don’t get it,” said Armstrong. “If he’s dead, who’s doing the typing? Do you copy? Decker, come in.”

  “We copy,” said Decker.

  “It’s a zombie,” said Ivanov. “A drone. His computer is being driven remotely.” He reached out for a keyboard, began entering code.

  “By whom?” Decker asked him. “From where?”

  “Just give me a minute,” said Ivanov, still typing away with precision. “Vladivostok. No, sorry, Vermont.”

  “What?”

  “I mean Uzbekistan. No, wait. That isn’t right either. From...”

  “From where, Ivanov?”

  Ivanov looked up from his keyboard. His thick lenses glowed like a pair of full moons. “I have no fucking idea.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Monday, December 2

  Teddy Reed wondered why the words which came out of his mouth never seemed to match up with his memories. A supervisor on the electrical maintenance team at the Shannon Nuclear Power plant in Pottstown, PA, Teddy was recounting his latest fishing expedition for muskie on the Susquehanna and his audience in the Level 4 break room was falling asleep. His co-workers shuffled and fidgeted. They slurped at their coffees, glassy-eyed and indifferent.

  That which was, Teddy thought, was made pure by my memory, redefined, made resplendent. And yet, now, the remembrance spilled out without form, grace or elegance. The symbols clumped up and collided. Then again, it was 4:00 in the morning.

  But, in his mind...In his mind, it was different. When he said, “Then I cast my lure...” in his memory, in a cascade of exquisite bio-electrical energy, he could still see the bright copper spoon as it arced like a firework—lit by tendrils of dawn, coursing over the water—as it started to finally descend, piercing the brooding black surface tension barely an inch from that stump. He recalled how his line had just stopped, how the thick rod had bowed, pumped and steadied, and how, in the distance, he had seen the black water swell for an instant, lifted up by the tail of that fish. That fish!

  Teddy heaved back on the rod—once, twice—setting the hook.

  “What is it?” said Angelo, his fishing companion.

  There was a splash and the line started singing as the spool doubled back on itself. “Don’t know.”

  Angelo dropped his rod to the gunwale and reached for the landing net. The fish was running for the rocks. “Looks decent,” he said.

  The fish ran once again, then slowed. Teddy twisted on his seat, swinging his line round the bow. He pumped and he pumped, and a dark silhouette churned the water. Northern pike. And, judging from the movement of the rod, the way that its dorsal fin slashed at the surface, Teddy knew it was big. Twenty pounds. Maybe more.

  Angelo reached across with the net, only to stop and say, “Jesus H. Christ. What the fuck?”

  Teddy peered into the murky currents of the river. The pike had twisted to one side and, clamped across its back, primordial and huge, he could see the thorny jawbone of another fish. There was a flash of golden stripes. The frigid water heaved. The reel began to sing again and he saw the pike collapse upon itself, the massive body cut in half.

  Angelo pulled his hand back into the boat reflexively.

  The pike began to sink, its severed head concealed behind an amaranth of blood. The second fish advanced. It swam lethargically beside the boat, the jaws maneuvering the remnants of the pike along its bony throat, the hackled fins extended and blood discharging through its gills.

  For a moment, it was still, its left eye fixed upon the fishermen as if in recognition. The muskie was as long as the boat. Then, slowly, deliberately, it sank into the depths.

  This is what Teddy saw in his mind. But the words...They came out all different. The tale seemed to falter and still, to fold back, to collapse on itself. Like that pike.

  “And then he just kinda vanished,” he concluded.

  Teddy’s co-workers barely acknowledged his story. They sat in the break room distracted, half-asleep, simply sipping their coffees.

  Teddy sighed. Words are never enough. There are things and the symbols of things, he considered. But as close as they came, they never converged. They were broken, like faulty capacitors, always shy of full charge.

  His radio beeped. It was Andy Wisniewski, one of the Control Room Operators.

  “You’d better get down here,” he told him. “Dick’s having a connipshit.”

  “Which one?” Teddy asked.

  “They both are.”

  Though part of a three-man electrical team, the other two members were off tagging faulty equipment, so Teddy took the elevator down by himself to 2A, the level where the control room and generators were housed. A tall, lanky man with high cheekbones, black hair and dark eyes, Teddy spent several obligatory minutes in the PCM-18 by the elevators, a personal contamination monitor made by Eberline, putting both of his arms into a long metal tube to check for radiation exposure. The units were interspersed throughout the facility so that sometimes Teddy felt like he worked inside some giant submarine, with each section sealed off by watertight hatches.

  By the time he reached the control room, Dick Covington, the Shift Manager, was verging on apoplexy, yelling at Dick Miller, the Common Operator.

  There had been some humming on the line, Wisniewski whispered to Teddy, bringing him up to speed. At least, that’s what Covington had called it. Weird vacillations in signal strength. Then, a dispatcher named Patrick Gallagher—monitoring the grid from a PJM bunker in King of Prussia—had put in a call. Something was off, he’d told Covington, as if they weren’t already aware of the issue. As if they were blind.

  But was it the grid, or one of the generators at the Shannon facility?

  Covington asked for four minutes to check out the problem.

  PJM was but one of a series of quasi-governmental companies that maintained the American power grid, shunting wholesale electrical energy from Shannon to PJM to PECO, the local power company, which divvied it up between all of the businesses and consumers in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area who were willing to pay. They made sure the grid was both stable and working efficiently. If they said something was funky, thought Teddy, it had to be serious.

  The Shannon nuclear power plant featured two boiling water GE reactors capable of generating more than two thousand net megawatts, enough energy to power more than two million homes. And each sy
stem on the 600-acre site was monitored here, in the Control Room. Forty by fifty feet of nothing but dials, gauges, displays and controls, the nerve center of the operation was manned 24/7 by two Operators, like Wisniewski—one for each system—plus a Common Operator to relieve them, a Control Room Supervisor or Shift Manager, and a pair of Equipment Operators. This shift, the Control Room Supervisor was Covington, or Dick number one, as Wisniewski liked to call him.

  As soon as Covington had hung up with the dispatcher, added Wisniewski, he told the CO, Dick number two, to ease off a bit—from 100% capacity to 91%—so they could check out the system. “Everything seemed to be going by the book when one of the generators started to slow down too much, well below the prescribed sixty megahertz. So Covington followed procedure and tried to pull the faulty unit offline. But, for some unexplained reason, the system wouldn’t obey him. That’s when we called up to Electrical Maintenance,” Wisniewski concluded. “Since then—”

  “You!” Covington spotted Reed in the corner. He practically lunged at the man. “When did you get here?”

  “Just now,” Teddy said.

  Covington was a large man with a thinning gray crew cut, square face and pot belly. His hunched posture always made him appear as if he were ducking to get through a doorway. Rumor had it he’d served on a nuclear carrier for a time in the eighties. Perhaps that explained it.

  Covington scowled. “Go to the generator room and shut it down manually.” It was as if he were talking to a five year old child. “On the double!”

  With a glance at Wisniewski, Teddy quit the Control Room. Four hours, he thought. Only four hours left to the end of his shift. Five hours and he’d be out on the river again, in his new boat with the wind in his face. Now that he’d seen that fish, it was all he could think about. And he knew exactly where to hunt for him now. He’d be ready.

  Teddy stepped through the doorway and was immediately assaulted by the din of the first of the two GE generators. It was hissing and vibrating strangely. He ran over and tried to shut down the engine with the emergency switch in the panel, but the system ignored him. So he radioed back up to tell Covington.

  “Keep trying,” the Shift Manager told him. “All the sensors seem normal. It’s as if...Wait a minute,” he added. The radio crackled. “I’m seeing it now. Failure in the monophasic inverter, and then a delay of four seconds to the BUS bar.”

  There was a frightful noise and Teddy looked up. The giant green generator, more than twenty feet tall, began to shiver and smoke, throwing off parts. He’d never seen anything like it. The machine looked like a train engine on its way off the tracks.

  An alarm began howling. Yellow lights flashed.

  “The more it slows down,” Teddy shouted, “the more the other generators on the grid are trying to compensate, which is only putting more stress on the system.”

  Teddy was suddenly joined by the two other members of his electrical team and by Miller, the Common Operator. Miller was practically crying. He had the wide round face of a beer brewer, pale blue eyes and bright silver hair.

  “Pull the fucking thing out,” he cried, crowding the men at the panel. “The whole gang plate. Cut the wire.” He turned to face Teddy, white as a sheet. “What are you looking at? Go to the ECR. You’ll have to switch out the BUS breaker manually. Take Winthrop.” Winthrop was another member of his electrical maintenance crew.

  Teddy ran back toward the Control Room. The electrical room was on the same level, just a few hatches away. He followed Winthrop, a gangly black man with broad sideburns, down the long corridor. Winthrop stopped off at the PCM-18 radiation monitor, following protocol. As he waited his turn, Teddy could still hear Dick Miller shouting behind him, plus the withering thrum of the generator. He could still feel the stuttering vibration in the floor plates below him as the engine cycled out of control.

  “Oh, Jesus,” screamed Miller. “You’ll have to take that panel out too. The cable’s behind it.”

  And the static dry tone of Dick Covington on the radio: “Turbine trip caused steam pressure increase, opening four ASDVs, plus three safety discharge valves. Dick, can you read me? Wait a minute. Now I’ve got an independent failure. Jesus, what’s next? I’ve got a CA One absorber rod stuck at seventy-five percent immersion. Dick? Dick, are you listening?”

  “I’m listening to this fucking thing shaking beside me. It’s coming apart.”

  Teddy jockeyed past Winthrop, who was still waiting for the monitor to register clear.

  “Hey you can’t...” Winthrop started, then tore after him.

  They ripped open the door. The electrical room was lined with dozens of gray rectangular panels which regulated the current of each system throughout the facility. This was the spark at the heart of the plant.

  “Are we clear?” Teddy said in his radio as he dashed down the aisle. It was like running down the hall of some high school, with row upon row of gray metal lockers. BUS 11. BUS 12. BUS 13. He stopped.

  “You’re clear,” replied Covington.

  “Yeah, everything looked crystal before,” Winthrop said in a hoarse whisper beside him. “I don’t know, man.”

  Teddy stared up at his co-worker. He looked back at the panel. Then, without another word, he began twisting the wing latches and pulled off the panel. He pushed the Contact Position button to Off, reached down with both hands for the stab, and yanked upward.

  A blue ball of energy rolled out of the panel.

  Teddy Reed vanished, literally vaporized as the charge turned the water in each of his cells into steam in an instant. Standing three feet away, Winthrop’s arms were singed off by the charge, severed at the shoulders by the electrical blast.

  There are things and the symbols of things. But all is a wash of electrical signals. All is only made real through perception, ennobled by memory. So, which is more genuine? The thing...or its symbol remembered?

  The last thing Teddy saw were the jaws of that muskie, bright blue and electric, swimming up through the dark Susquehanna, attached to the end of his line.

  CHAPTER 7

  Monday, December 2

  It was around four o’clock when Decker discovered that someone with the handle BORG347 had recently challenged H2O2 in a programming chat room to see if he could hack Westlake Defense Systems. Ivanov was no longer around. He’d been called off to check on the DOW. A “rogue algorithm” was buying, then selling millions of shares without explanation, sending values soaring or plunging.

  On his own, Decker had gotten first crack at H2O2’s hard drive, uploaded by Armstrong, which had led him to the Internet Relay Chat Room and the log of the hacker’s exchange.

  It was amazing how forthcoming people were in IRCs. They talked about everything. Some made an attempt to use codes, but the ciphers were usually so obvious that Decker unraveled them easily. It was as if they didn’t realize that once you posted a comment, they were there for the whole world to see, for all time.

  By tracking down a similar handle—BORG743—through the Net Registry, Decker soon uncovered a website about Persian cuisine linked to a physical address in Tehran. Further, this physical address was associated with a Gmail account, fronted by a fictitious name, but married to a particular IP address, the unique numeric identifier for a computer on a network.

  Now I’ve got you, thought Decker. In just a few hours, using one of Ivanov’s programs, Decker managed to break into the PC associated with the IP address and, upon further scrutiny, determined that someone had used this machine to indirectly plant “bombs” in certain Westlake Defense Systems software in order to make it fail during enemy attacks; the logic bombs would make hostile and friendly aircraft look similar.

  It was incredible. And Westlake didn’t seem to be the only defense contractor compromised. H2O2 may have been dead but his legacy lingered. Somehow, he had assisted his Iranian masters in penetrating a half dozen top secret DoD systems...before someone had managed to put a small caliber bullet in his temple only minutes before Armstr
ong and his team had arrived.

  Decker was about to probe further when the secure phone at his desk started ringing. “Decker,” he said, barely concentrating, but there was nothing but silence at the other end of the line. “Hello?” he continued. “Hello, this is Special Agent Decker. Who’s there?”

  “Have you missed me?” a voice said in Arabic.

  As soon as he heard it, Decker’s heart turned to stone. He knew that voice. It was reaching up from the grave. El Aqrab!

  “I’ve missed you,” he continued. “I’ve thought about you every day since we last saw each other.”

  Decker caught his breath. “Who is this?” he answered in Arabic.

  “You know who this is.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  El Aqrab laughed. “You gave it to me. Remember? On La Palma.”

  “What are you talking about?” Decker started to peck at his keyboard, trying to set up a trace.

  “Don’t bother,” El Aqrab said. “I won’t be on long.”

  Decker hesitated.

  “That’s better.”

  It was as if he were actually watching him. As if he had a camera right there in the Crypt.

  For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then El Aqrab asked, “Don’t you miss going out into the field, Special Agent Decker? Or do you prefer people like Armstrong doing your dirty work for you? Why doesn’t Hellard ever let you play with the real agents?”

  Decker didn’t respond.

  “Too bad H2O2 was dead when they got there.”

  “Is that why you called me, whoever you are? To gloat about H2O2. To brag about how you put a slug in the back of his head.”

  El Aqrab laughed. “Good try but he was shot in the temple. And it wasn’t by me. I’m not in Philadelphia. In fact, I’m in your neck of the woods. I believe that’s the proper expression. Neck of the woods. Not that far away. I have other plans for the day.”

  Decker felt the world grind to a halt. “Plans. What plans?”