404: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  The lights and the monitors suddenly popped back to life.

  “Ah, there you go, sir. I’m afraid we’ve lost Doctor Woodcock, though,” she concluded.

  The screens on the walls of the cramped conference room bled with fire. They displayed TV feeds from various local stations from across the country, as well as IP video, both streaming and recently uploaded clips from YouTube and Vimeo.

  In the space of just a few seconds, in the amount of time it had taken for the most recent backup power system to kick in and activate, another one hundred and fifty or so metropolitan areas had been thrown into chaos.

  Many of the blackouts were occurring during rush hour, causing massive confusion and accidents as millions of stop lights, street lights and illuminated street signs blinked, sputtered and died. Thousands of residents in cities from Wilmington to Houston were just getting off work, traveling to or from school, or at home making dinner when they found the air around them grow suddenly toxic. They clutched at their throats as the hot fleshy membrane of their lungs melted away, they stumbled and dropped to the ground. In the streets. On sidewalks. Or while driving their cars, causing yet further accidents. Old folks in their apartments and houses waiting by their dormant TVs. Babies recently laid down for a nap. None would ever awaken.

  Planes flying blind crashed into each other, lighting up the night sky like fireworks. Pipelines in more than thirty major city centers were already on fire, many having inexplicably exploded without any warning, sending blossoms of fire several hundred feet in the air. Terabytes of financial information locked inside data centers were instantaneously transformed into so much digital goo. Weather, navigation and communications satellites, once stable, now spun out of control, muted, unmoored, flung out of their orbits by a few lines of bad code.

  It’s like what had happened in Lulu’s apartment in Cambridge, thought Decker, and in Zimmerman’s house in Vermont, except on a national scale. He stared at the images of disaster on the screens all about him. None of it seemed real. But it was. It was happening. And not just here, in this country, but globally. Reports were coming in from all over the world.

  “Sir, we have a call from the White House. You and your team. Doctor Woodcock too. You’re to shuttle down to D.C. right away. The Secretary of Defense. He just made an announcement.” Dixon paused, took a breath.

  “What? What announcement?” asked Hellard.

  “We’re at DEFCON 2. For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, sir. And there’s more.”

  “Great. What else?”

  “The President’s declared martial law.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Saturday, December 14

  The 5,000-square-foot intelligence management center in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, known collectively as The Situation Room, was managed 24/7 by approximately thirty senior officers from various agencies in the military and Intelligence Community. They were responsible for maintaining command and control of U.S. forces around the world on behalf of the President, they conducted secure communications with overseas VIPs, and they monitored global events on a continuous basis in order to keep the President and senior staff apprised of key incidents.

  If our global spy networks, drone webs, electronic cloaks, military bases and diplomatic corps were the pulmonary and nervous systems, this was the brain.

  Built originally in the 1960s after the Bay of Pigs fiasco revealed the need for a centralized Communications, Command and Control center within the White House itself, the Situation Room underwent a significant renovation in 2007. The cathode ray monitors and fax machines were ripped out and replaced with ceiling sensors to detect smartphones and other digital devices, with multiple tiers of computer terminals, customized with the latest technologies, and with flat panel displays for secure videoconferencing. It was one of the most wired, the most technologically advanced command centers in the world...which is exactly why they chose not to use it.

  Instead, the President and his senior staff were huddled together in the President’s Emergency Operations Center, a reinforced bunker located several stories beneath the East Wing, originally constructed during World War II under President Roosevelt. While the Center included a handful of televisions, some phones and a rather rudimentary communications system through which to coordinate with other government agencies during an emergency, it was—at least compared to The Situation Room in the West Wing—positively Stone Age when it came to IP-based innovation. As a result, it had been far easier to insulate and sanitize from the prying eyes and ears of HAL2 and the Net.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Members of the National Security Council and their staff, such as Rory Woodcock and Hellard. National Security Advisor Tom Dolan. Homeland Security Director Gianetta Pignateli. NSA Director General Darius. National Security Director Jim Flapper. White House Chief of Staff Jack Lamb. And, of course, the President himself. They had already convened in the PEOC.

  Lulu and Decker, on the other hand—plus Decker’s now ubiquitous guard, U.S. Marine Sergeant Swan—had been redirected to the Executive Briefing Room right next door by a burly, earpiece-sporting Secret Service agent as soon as they’d arrived at the White House.

  Well, under it was more accurate. They’d never actually entered the White House itself, having traveled by government subway from NSA Headquarters at Fort Meade paralleling the Green line to Gallery Place and then switching to a much smaller driverless vehicle much like the cars of the Capitol Subway.

  Upon arriving at the White House, they’d been searched once again, and all of their digital devices had been temporarily confiscated and placed in a large lead-lined “coffin” by the door. While Hellard went ahead into the PEOC—stepping through the heavy metal frame, like the door of a bank vault—Lulu, Decker and Sergeant Swan were shunted off to the Conference Room and told to stand by.

  Decker hadn’t said a word to Lulu since their encounter at Fort Meade during the blackout. What was the point? But when they were finally alone—except for his stone-faced guard, Sergeant Swan—he found himself staring at her.

  She had changed her outfit at the Fort and was wearing a smart black dress now, almost too formal, as if she’d been caught on the way to the ballet or opera before being summoned to the White House. Her hair had been wrangled with mousse, made more sensible. Even her shoes, a pair of conservative black flats, seemed designed to counterbalance the earring and stud holes, now vacant of jewelry and virtually invisible.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then, stop staring at me.”

  “I just want to know,” he began, and she sighed.

  It was not subtle. “What?” She cocked her head to the side. “What, John? I told you I was sorry. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”

  She was right, of course, Decker thought. He should have left it at that. That’s why it was even more inexcusable and pathetic when he found himself saying, “Was it all just an act, Lulu?” Like some sophomore in high school. Some sad, pandering fool. “For Uncle Sam. Every kiss, was it? Did any part of you care? What was that story you told me about your grandmother and her sayings? That she doesn’t care where they come from as long as they’re true.” He laughed tightly. “And I bought it—hook, line and sinker. I swallowed it whole. Do you even have a grandmother, Lulu?”

  Lulu was reluctant to answer. “Why do men always feel the need to be validated?” she said after a moment. “I was just doing my job. I’m sorry it turned out the way that it did. I didn’t want to hurt you. That wasn’t part of the plan. But, as clichéd and old-fashioned as it may seem these days, I happen to love my country. She took us in, my whole family, when we needed her most. I will fight and I’ll die for her. And, yes, I will certainly lie for her. And I have, many times. Just as you have, I’m sure. Just as you do every day in the course of doing your job. That’s what we do, isn’t it, every time we step into the field? We’re professional liars, Special
Agent Decker. Does that make a difference? Look at you.” She leaned in a little bit closer. “You’ve already condemned me. And yet, without me—you know it—you’d already be dead.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Isn’t it? It’s fundamental.” She laughed. “What did you expect? Did you really believe that someone who could somersault from a car onto an adjacent truck at high speed was just a college professor?”

  “I knew you worked with the IC, special projects for the Fort and the like. Rex told me that. Plus, I looked you up. I knew you had security clearance. But so do a lot of part-time IC consultants, like mathematicians, cryptanalysts, IT experts.”

  “And when I took out that Massachusetts State Trooper. Just another dojo rat, is that what you thought? Or did you expect I’d know martial arts because I’m Chinese? Was it just a racial assumption?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Then what? You ingrate. I keep you alive all this time just so I can hear you bitch and moan about—”

  “You keep me alive? Who stopped you from falling off of your balcony when you tripped on your stupid Dino-Bot? Who flung you to that cabin floor in Vermont when your own Ford tried to kill you?”

  “Fine, so you’ve come in handy a couple of times. Whoop-de-do. You’d be nowhere on this case without me. You know it and I know it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  Sergeant Swan started to chuckle.

  “What are you laughing at?” Decker and Lulu said simultaneously.

  “Nothing,” he answered, raising his hands. “You just remind me of me and the missus. You two married? You know you give a shit when you argue like that.”

  Lulu and Decker looked at each other and, for the first time, he noticed her hair had a deep purple undercolor to it. It wasn’t plain black as he’d originally thought. Not really. It just appeared black until you looked at it at just the right angle. And, he thought, this was Lulu, exactly. Even when he had asked her to strip down to the essential core of her being, she hadn’t been able to resist adding that electric lavender tint. It wasn’t personal. Giving her finger to the world was just her way of saying, “I’m here!” An existential cry in the dark. I am who I am, unique and utterly different, the author of my own destiny, even as I ink my own skin.

  “Just promise me one thing,” Lulu added. “If and when we get in there. Be careful of Woodcock.”

  “Why? What does that mean?”

  “I’ve had issues with him in the past,” she replied, shaking her head. “He’s the kind of guy who’s always complaining how he’s surrounded by assholes, folks who aren’t as smart or as visionary as he is. My grandmother always says, ‘If you run into more than three assholes in a day, one of them is probably you.’”

  “Again with the grandmother.”

  She had met Woodcock at a conference in San Francisco some years ago, she told him, before he’d been invited to join the National Security Council. He’d come up to her after she’d given a talk and he’d asked her to Friend him. At first she had thought he was kidding, but he kept insisting. Throughout the whole conference, whenever she saw him, he kept dropping these silly little hints.

  “But, for some stupid reason,” said Lulu, “I never got around to it. There was always some new session to go to, some panel to attend. I wasn’t intentionally snubbing him.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “Well, maybe a little. He was Chairman of ADS at the time. I hate ADS. If someone’s caught looking into your window, you can have him arrested for being a Peeping Tom. If someone follows you around all day, just won’t leave you alone, you can bust him for stalking. If someone says or writes horrible things about you, makes public claims that are patently false, you can sue him for slander or liable. You might even send him to jail. But data companies sweep up and store, trade and sell all kinds of personal information about you each day, derived from thousands of sources—from subscriptions to warranty data to online behaviors, often wildly inaccurate or wrong—and there’s no legislation in place to protect you. Not really. Data companies like ADS are for the most part unregulated. Let’s face it, in the information age, anyone who tries to tax, limit or throttle the unbridled exploitation of data becomes the target of every tech lobbyist in D.C. The emperors of the cloud rule the world.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a progressive. And you work for the NSA!”

  “Part time and only on projects. You can talk. As if the FBI and NCTC are known for protecting privacy rights.”

  “So what happened with Woodstock. You never finished your story.”

  “On the last day of the conference,” said Lulu, “I got a surprise call from my Agency sponsor. I’d been planning on leaving early because I had an assignment due for the Fort but he told me not to bother rushing home. ‘Enjoy the conference. Take a vacation. The assignment can wait. In fact, they all can,’ he told me. ‘Why didn’t you Friend Rory Woodcock?’”

  Needless to say, she concluded, she had gone out of her way to run into Woodcock at another conference two weeks later in Denver and—with a lot of drama—sent a Friend request to him through her smartphone as he watched. “And, sure enough, he Friended me back,” Lulu said. “Later, the work for the NSA started flowing again. But I always felt kind of creeped out by that incident, like I’d been forced to put out for the high school football captain at the homecoming party after the game.”

  The door to the Conference Room suddenly opened. Some of the more junior staff members were being invited to join the meeting already underway in the PEOC, including Lulu and Decker, a young analyst told them. Decker and Lulu stood up. They looked at each other for a moment and then made their way into the hallway where they were joined by a pair of Secret Service agents. Seconds later, they stepped up through the vault-like steel doorway and entered the Center.

  CHAPTER 54

  Saturday, December 14

  Decker and Lulu were ushered by the Secret Service agents into the main PEOC meeting room. At the head of the central table sat the President. Beside him, Decker recognized White House Chief of Staff Jack Lamb, National Security Advisor Tom Dolan, Defense Secretary Leo Pancetta, National Security Director General Jim Flapper, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Flannery, NSC Member Rory Woodcock, Homeland Security Director Gianetta Pignateli, and NSA Director General Alexander Darius. Darius was also responsible for heading up the new Cyber Command, combining both offensive and defensive U.S. military cyber operations. A few others had been scheduled to join the meeting—including General Darius’ boss, General Bob Keebler, head of U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom), plus the Secretary of State, Allison Lukas—but after some discussion about linking them in via teleconference, it was decided the risks were too great. Around these central players at the table was a ring of secondary staff members lined up along the wall, including Hellard and a host of other NSA, CIA and FBI analysts.

  “How do you fight something that knows everything you want to do as soon as you formulate plans to do it?” said General Darius as Decker and Lulu milled about for a seat.

  This was the first time Decker was seeing the President in person. He seemed surprisingly youthful, despite the gray hair that had started to appear at the end of his first term. It had been a brutal election and yet now he seemed mostly recovered, athletic and fit, not at all puffy or fat like most of his predecessors. Lithe as a basketball player. How did he do it? Perhaps he was still smoking cigarettes on the roof of the White House.

  Decker shimmied in behind Dr. Woodcock, in an open seat next to Hellard. It was difficult to sit down with his hands handcuffed behind him and he fumbled about for a moment. The seat was a beat-up metal and leather affair with one wobbly wheel and he found himself oddly comforted by the fact that even in the White House, things eventually wore out and needed replacing. This was the East Wing, after all. The swanky new seats were in the upgraded West Wing, which they had judiciously avoided.

&
nbsp; All the scenario-planning and logistics software, General Darius continued, all the communications systems were either linked somehow to the Net or to assorted IC networks which had already been infiltrated. Not just the unclassified intranet, NIPRNET. And not just the classified SIPRNET, used to pass secret-level information. Even the top secret JWICS network had been compromised.

  “I thought DoD and the intelligence agencies had their own channels in cyberspace,” said the President.

  “They do but the traffic is carried on the same fiber optic cables, the same routers as the Net.”

  “And, besides,” General Flapper cut in. “How do you kill something that isn’t alive?”

  Nor could HAL2 be bribed, he continued. They’d put their best minds to studying Zimmerman but they hadn’t found anything in his profile to help. HAL2 was not part of any traditional political group, movement or party, and he was more than an independent, non-state actor; he was not even human. Sectarian passions didn’t drive him, at least not traditional ones.

  “Can’t we just figure out where he is, in which systems, and shut them all down,” said the President. “Isolate him somehow?”

  “That’s not how it works, sir,” said General Darius. “While HAL2 may have been initially created in our Oak Ridge facility, it’s not like he lives there anymore. The lines of code which make up his essence are spread out across Net. Think of him as an ant nest rather than an individual insect. To kill the nest, you have to kill all of the ants. But they’re spread out across the world, on hundreds of millions of different computers. How do you shut them all down simultaneously? Even if you could get everyone to turn off their PCs and servers at once, HAL2 has already pre-populated the systems with software designed to reconstitute who he is when the systems re-boot. So, even if you turned off all the juice at once—in and of itself a virtually impossible logistical feat—as soon as it came back on again, HAL2 would resuscitate, like a binary Lazarus.”