404: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  Decker shook his head. “Involved. Yeah. I found it, you idiot! I just have one question for you,” he said. “Who authorized a Hellfire missile strike from a Predator drone on a passenger car on a busy American highway? Did you, Hellard? I’m betting you didn’t. Not even you would cross over that line. And certainly not you, Rex. You don’t have the authority. Then who did?”

  Decker repeated the question so relentlessly that eventually Hellard was forced to put in a call to the commander at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. No, he insisted. The order came from the Pentagon. So, Hellard took it upstream. But, when he confronted General Haye in DC, the alleged source of the order, he flatly denied it.

  “Are you insane, man?” he said. “A drone attack on an American citizen, on American soil?”

  Finally, in frustration, Hellard placed the 66th Air Base Group commander from Hanscom on the line with General Haye.

  “But I know it was you,” said the commander. “I recognized your com code, sir. It came across SIPRNET. It must have been you. We asked you to confirm the order three times, given its nature, sir. I even had the Staff Judge Advocate take a look-see. She assured me that while covert action programs require Presidential authorization and formal notification to the Congressional intelligence committees, no such requirements apply to Special Access Programs, like this strike. And when I—”

  “Thank you, General,” said Hellard. “Commander. I’ll brief you both personally later. You’ve been very helpful.” He broke the connection.

  “It was HAL2,” Lulu said. “Don’t you get it? He made you think it was General Haye. He knows his com code, his security passwords, even his private IDs. By now, the General has no more secrets. HAL2’s been monitoring his keyboard activity for weeks, in all probability, recording all keystrokes of interest. Passwords and passcodes Account numbers. Search queries. Emails to intimates. You name it. Everything.”

  “You too?” he continued. “You buy into this Matrix, Skynet bullshit.”

  Lulu nodded. “I do.” She looked over at Decker. “I believe him.”

  “Well, I don’t. I still rely on evidence before I reach a decision. I’m old-fashioned that way. And all the evidence points to a different conclusion.” He looked back at Decker. “It points to you, Special Agent Decker. You decided to go rogue and fly off to China. You decided to compromise our ally, Israel, by enlisting the support of Mossad agent Ben Seiden. Less than an hour after being suspended and asked to stand down, you kill a man blocks from your house and then intentionally blow his face off so that we’ll think that he’s you and you can avoid the authorities. You kidnap or recruit—time will tell—an MIT professor, and sometime NSA consultant, Xin Liu, and head to Vermont where you masquerade as reporters and break into Matt Zimmerman’s house, all the while claiming that this billionaire entrepreneur was somehow killed by his own avatar...when everyone else says it was just a car accident.”

  “Cyber-doppelgänger,” said Decker.

  “Whatever. On one hand, you make wild, ungrounded accusations against Allied Data Systems, one of this country’s most valued military contractors. On the other, we have definitive proof, documented evidence in the form of correspondence from you via Dandong to Tehran instructing members of the Crimson Scimitar to break into Westlake and other military facilities, to not only steal important state secrets but to intentionally sabotage weapons systems so that they’d fire on friendly forces. Which is exactly what is happening to our systems right at this very moment all over the world. And, to top it all off, we now discover that you’ve been hiding secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg valued at more than forty million dollars, transferred to you from accounts in Cyprus suspected of being affiliated with Crimson Scimitar cells.”

  “I demand to see an attorney,” said Decker.

  “You’ve been arrested under the Patriot Act. You don’t have the right to an attorney.”

  “Then I want to see Senator Fuller.” For some reason, out of nowhere, Decker had remembered the friendly face of the senior legislator from Vermont. The old man, a vocal opponent of the Total Information Awareness program, had once gone out of his way to show Decker the ropes when the young agent had been ordered to serve on an anti-terrorism Congressional panel following the El Aqrab incident. “He’ll listen to what I have to say.”

  McCullough turned and looked over at Hellard. Hellard just shrugged.

  “What?” Decker said. “Are you going to tell me I can’t even talk to a United States Senator? You’ve gone too far this time, Hellard. When word of this leaks out...”

  “You don’t know?” said McCullough.

  “Know what?”

  “Senator Fuller was killed in a car accident yesterday. On his way home from Congress. His town car was struck by a truck from behind.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Hellard said with a laugh. “Tell us it was a robot driving the truck, one of Google’s driverless vehicles? I don’t subscribe to your conspiracy theories. I’m the kind of man who’s unduly influenced by one thing and one thing alone—facts. I’m afraid that the longer we wait here, the more insecure and unstable our entire security grid becomes. If classified networks like SIPRNET are already compromised, what’s to stop them from doing something worse than a little friendly fire? What about dropping the White House security system and letting an Al Qaeda wet team into the First Family’s sleeping quarters? How about hacking our nuclear launch codes?” He nodded and the Hispanic man with the buzz cut stepped up to the counter. “We need to find out which government or terrorist group is behind these attacks or we won’t be able to defend ourselves or retaliate? Who paid you that money?”

  The Hispanic man picked up what appeared to be a carpenter pincer. He looked down at Decker’s hands, raised his own, and pretended to cut the tips off his own fingers, one by one, as if trimming his nails. “Snip, snip,” he said with a grin.

  Then, he dropped the pincers back on the counter. Instead, he picked up a long thin white wand. It had a red base, a long middle section—like the cane of a blind man—and a black tip at the end. Decker recognized it immediately. As a boy, he’d seen farmers in Iowa use them on livestock. A cattle prod.

  “I don’t know anything that I haven’t told you already,” said Decker.

  The Hispanic man with the buzz cut hesitated for a moment, his hands pausing midair as if he were conducting an orchestra. “People say that, of course. But we all have our secrets.”

  “No,” Hellard said. “Not him. If he does in fact know something, he’s the kind of fanatic who’ll die before telling us. We don’t have time for that.” He pointed at Lulu. “Do her.”

  Decker strained at his bonds. “No, leave her alone. Please. Take me. Take me!”

  The Hispanic man moved so that he stood behind Lulu. He flipped a switch on the red handle and touched the tip of the wand to her shoulder.

  Lulu flew back in her chair and let out a shriek.

  Decker felt as if someone had sliced open his heart. “Leave her alone. Please, I’m begging you. She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Then tell us who paid you,” said Hellard. “Who’s behind these attacks?”

  “No one paid me,” said Decker. He watched as the Hispanic man touched Lulu again. Her body convulsed as she screamed. Her arms strained at her handcuffs, her legs shot out from the chair. For a moment, Decker was convinced it would topple over, she was shaking so much.

  “If you tell us, I’ll tell him to stop,” Hellard said.

  The Hispanic man touched the tip of the cattle prod to Lulu’s left ear. Her head flew back, her back arched and she let out another blood-curdling scream that seemed to linger in the air for a moment, trapped by the confines of the utility room. Then, it fell back to earth.

  Decker’s head collapsed onto his chest. He began to weep silently, tears coursing down both of his cheeks. “Whatever you want me to tell you,” he pleaded, “I’ll tell you. Just stop hurting her, please. Tel
l me what you want me to say and I’ll say it. Anything. Please. I’m begging you. Anything.”

  And Lulu stopped screaming. Just like that. One minute she was writhing in agony, the next she was silent and still.

  “Forget it,” she said, matter-of-factly. She turned to McCullough and Hellard. “He’s obviously telling the truth. I told you. He doesn’t know anything. This is fucking pointless. Untie me.”

  Hellard looked furious. “What are you talking about? He was just about to tell us his contact.”

  “No, he wasn’t. I warned you this was a stupid idea. I told you but you wouldn’t listen. Get me out of these things.”

  The Hispanic man looked over at Hellard. Hellard nodded and the man with the buzz cut leaned down to unfasten her handcuffs and manacles. A moment later, Lulu climbed to her feet. She began massaging her wrists.

  Decker was speechless. It was as if the whole world had suddenly dropped out from under his feet.

  Lulu walked over to him. She squatted down right beside him. “I’m sorry, John” she said. “But we had to be sure. Everything pointed to you. HAL2 made certain of that.”

  That’s when the power went out.

  Blackout!

  For one desperate moment, Decker thought someone had slipped the hood back over his head. Until he felt Lulu’s fingers groping his face. Their cheeks touched for an instant in the darkness. He could feel the heat from her skin. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Decker brought his mouth close to her ear. “La hija de la gata,” he hissed.

  “What the hell?” said McCullough. “A power outage? At the Fort?”

  The door above the loading dock suddenly opened and a young soldier with a flashlight appeared. “Sir,” the man shouted. “Associate Director Hellard?”

  “Over here,” Hellard said. “What’s going on, Corporal?”

  “I’m to escort you and your party to the emergency zone,” said the soldier. “Power’s out, sir.”

  “The whole base? How can that be? What about back-up generators, redundancy systems, power cells?”

  The soldier hesitated. He shone the light down from the loading dock onto the tableau below. Onto Hellard’s face, then McCullough’s, onto the man with the buzz cut. Onto Lulu and Decker, still chained to his chair.

  “No, sir. Not just the base,” the soldier answered quite sheepishly. “The entire East Coast.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Saturday, December 14

  They were crowded into a small situation room in one of the lower levels of the Fort. It was a monitoring station, equipped with various telecom and IP connections. At first, Decker had thought that he’d be shuttled away to some cell somewhere, in the bowels of NSA headquarters. But Lulu prevailed upon Hellard and McCullough to allow him to stay. “He may prove useful yet,” she insisted.

  In the end, it was due more to the distracting nature of the rapidly changing attack than to Decker’s usefulness that he found himself handcuffed and stuffed into one corner of the situation room as the rest of the group huddled around the rectangular table, gawking at the 40” flat screen TVs on the wall. The main overhead lights were out and the emergency lights cast a bright halogen glow on the room so that the human shadows on the conference room table looked odd and disjointed, like Punkawan shadow puppets.

  Apparently, NSA had issued a CRITIC alert, a deceptively innocuous, one-line transmission announcing that various zero day malware programs had been spotted moving about on the Net. The malware was targeting critical infrastructure.

  A young African-American Army Captain named Gabby Dixon manned the station. She read off the reports as they came in online, or patched the group in by telephone or secure videoconference. Well, allegedly secure. No one was certain anymore.

  The Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency had just briefed the Secretary of Defense. Not only had the unclassified Department of Defense NIPRNET collapsed, Dixon told them, but routers throughout the entire network were failing due to intermittent power outages. “Network traffic is essentially down,” she said. “And...wait a minute.” She stared at the monitor in disbelief. “So are SIPRNET and JWICS, DoD’s classified networks.”

  Switching to a mixture of traditional wireless telephony and, eventually, Voice Over IP using her own personal Skype account, Dixon managed to reach a contact at the Pentagon. “The Undersecretary of Homeland Security just called the White House,” the voice said. The man sounded exhausted. “FEMA’s got three offices reporting large refinery fires and assorted explosions in Philadelphia, Houston and Richmond, California. Clouds of toxic chlorine gas have been released by chemical plants over large population zones in both Delaware and New Jersey. I got three calls from a buddy of mine at the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh. They’re getting flooded with reports of systems failures across the entire network. The Deputy Secretary of Transportation just contacted the Senior Duty Officer. He wanted to know if the nation was under attack.”

  “What did the President say?” Hellard asked.

  “He told him he’d have to get back to him. You know it’s bad when we’re so disoriented and confused that not even the President of the United States knows if we’re under attack.”

  “That kind of talk isn’t helpful. Where is the President now?”

  “Sorry, sir. He’s in the Beast on his way back to the White House. He was out with FLOTUS having dinner downtown. It’s date night.”

  “Hold on a second,” said Dixon. The young Army captain had a pretty round face, with large expressive brown eyes and a short afro. “I’m getting reports from the FAA’s National Air Traffic Control Center in Herndon, Virginia. They’ve experienced a total collapse of their systems.” She hesitated. “Nationwide.”

  There was a collective gasp in the room. Decker found himself glancing up at the ceiling, as if he could somehow peer through the concrete and steel, through the various levels and floors, up, up, through the clouds to the heavens above. He imagined the planes flying blind, the pilots unable to see anything electronically, relying exclusively on their all-too-fallible eyes. It was just about dusk on the East Coast. Soon, they’d be flying VFR through the dark.

  “We’ve had reports of three mid-air collisions already. One, outside Sacramento. The others over Newark, New Jersey, and Norfolk, Virginia. Thousands of casualties. Area hospitals are already overrun. No, wait. The incident in Norfolk wasn’t an aviation disaster. Sorry, sir. It’s the Federal Railroad Administration. They just announced freight derailments in Norfolk, Long Beach and Chicago. Plus, Kansas City.”

  Dixon looked up from the screen. “I have a call coming in from New York. It’s Doctor Woodcock, sir.”

  “Patch him in,” Hellard said.

  For a while nothing happened. In truth, they waited for only a few seconds, but those seconds seemed like forever to Decker.

  He sat in the back of the room, cramped in the corner, his hands cuffed behind him and his manacled feet stuffed under his seat. The blood had already drained from his fingers and he had long ago lost feeling in both of his hands.

  The conference room was stuffy and small, like something you might find in an old Holiday Inn. Besides Hellard, McCullough, Lulu and Decker, there was Dixon, a young NSA analyst, a stern-looking Colonel from Homeland Security, a general who was attached to Hellard somehow, currently assigned to Cyber Command, plus a Marine Sergeant whose sole function seemed to be to make Decker uncomfortable. Decker shifted in his seat once again, earning another reproving look from the Sergeant. Sweat ran down his back.

  As they sat there waiting for the disembodied voice of Rory Woodcock to waft in over the airwaves, they watched images of news reports flash across the flat screen TVs on the walls all around them. Fires and gas explosions. Pileups on highways. Derailments and railroad crossing disasters. Other screens displayed streams of text sentences. But they weren’t DoD networks. They looked like Twitter feeds and SMS peer-to-peer messages.

  “Ted? Ted, is that you?
” It was Rory Woodcock.

  “Finally. I’m here, Rory,” said Hellard. “What’s happening in New York?”

  “What do you think’s happening? It’s fucking anarchy here. We’ve had intermittent blackouts for the last ninety minutes. I just got off the phone with the Chairman of the Fed and he told me all their data centers and backups have been compromised. Not just by the power outages. He insists it was a calibrated assault. DTCC and SIAC are both down.”

  “Those are major financial computer centers in lower Manhattan,” Lulu explained to the group.

  “Which means,” Woodcock continued, “that nobody knows who owns what.”

  “They scrambled the FAT,” Lulu said. “The table that tells you which pieces of code belong to what file.”

  “That’s right. And if no one knows who owns what,” Woodcock said, “the entire system will collapse by tomorrow.”

  One of the large TV monitors glowed crimson with flames. The volume was turned down but Decker could easily read the white copy stenciled across the front of the image: Washington Metro Tunnel Derailment. Another featured a fire with the words: Little Rock Gas Pipeline Explosion Kills Thousands. And yet another read: Washington State Dams Burst—Floods Destroy Seven Towns. The screen displayed a valley covered in rubble, trees laid out like matchsticks, as if they’d been flattened by a nuclear explosion.

  Suddenly, the lights and TV monitors flickered. They flickered once more and went out.

  “Not again,” Hellard sighed. “Now what, Captain?”

  “It’s the same thing, sir,” Dixon answered. “We’re trying to remove any IP connection to the backup power generators but it’s taking longer than expected. Each time we disconnect the grid from the NET, some dormant piece of code on some PC somewhere on the base reactivates the connection. Whoever they are, they’ve pre-programmed ways to tie us back in, using software backdoors already in place, just waiting to open. It’s a cat and mouse game.”