China Strike

by Matt Rees

  He bent over Gibson and placed the dead man’s hands across his belly. Someone out there had Gibson’s afflictions and a whole load more laid at his feet right now. “I’m going to find them, Anthony,” he murmured.

  His cell phone rang. He picked up. “Hi, sis. You okay? I’m going to have to take a rain check on dinner. I’ll have to work on this—whatever it is. Tell the little princess I’m sorry to miss her.” He hung up.

  The roads were jammed. Any cars that hadn’t crashed were nonetheless going nowhere. Verrazzano left his ICE cruiser at the side of the highway feeder and jogged past the racetrack toward the A-train at Aqueduct station.

  A half hour later, he came out of the subway onto Eighth Avenue. Even on the steps out of the station he knew everything was wrong here too. The sirens of motionless ambulances wailed in the halted traffic, professional mourners at a funeral. Subway passengers stood at the top of the stairs, stilled by the sight that met them. Verrazzano looked up and down the canyon of tall buildings along the avenue. Everywhere the huddles around the dead, the injured on the curb, and the cars squeezed into the shape of discarded toothpaste tubes.

  He sprinted along Twenty-Sixth Street and into the redbrick building that housed the New York field office of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the sixth floor, he saw Noelle Kinsella striding across the Homeland Security Investigations area, her loose red hair flowing behind her and the bangles beating a rhythm at her wrists.

  “Jesus Christ, Dom,” she called out. “What the hell?”

  “Is the SAC here?”

  Kinsella tugged off her purple overcoat and tossed it into her cubicle. She headed toward the conference room in the corner of the floor next to the office of the Special Agent in Charge. “He called a meeting with FBI. Should have started about five minutes ago.”

  “I didn’t get anything on that.” Verrazzano waved his cell phone. Within minutes of the crash, everyone had hit the phones and the network blew up. “System’s down.”

  “Everything is down, except my blood pressure.”

  Kinsella pushed open the door and entered the conference room. Verrazzano followed her. There were three people, backlit by the big window and the bright sunlight off the Hudson. The head of the field office, Jim Callan, paced, his hand raised and brushing the wall nervously. In the quiet room, the Glock in his ankle holster ticked gently against his short boots with each step. Special Agent Roula Haddad, the computer specialist on Verrazzano’s team, sat at the end of the table. A woman in her early forties stood behind her, surveying the newcomers with hostility. That was sure to be the FBI agent. Her hair was light brown, cut to fall over her cheeks as if she wanted to hide behind it.

  Callan greeted his agents. “Dom, Noelle, take a seat.”

  Kinsella dropped into a chair. Verrazzano stayed on his feet. He rarely sat for anything, whether it was typing on his computer or drinking a coffee. He wasn’t about to start now, when he was buzzing with adrenaline.

  Callan wore a shirt the same off-white color as his face. His tie was the faint blue of a vein viewed through pale skin. It was as though you could see inside him and pick out his spinal column—except that his backbone went directly from his head to his gut. The SAC gestured toward the woman behind Roula Haddad. “Guys, this is Special Agent Gina Jahn, FBI, New York field office.”

  Jahn carried a little extra weight, but only so she could throw it in your face. She pursed her lips and glanced at Verrazzano like a very disappointed mother. Her neck crooked to the right. For Verrazzano that was a tell—a ploy to control the adrenaline that jagged the Fed’s neck muscles.

  Callan swept his hand to take in the new arrivals. “Special Agents Kinsella and Verrazzano.”

  “I’ll be liaising between ICE and FBI here.” Jahn kept her arms folded. “You guys pass on whatever you get to the Bureau through me.”

  “You’re going to pass information back the other way, right?” Kinsella’s sarcasm was as thick as her eye shadow.

  Jahn didn’t appreciate that. “FBI is lead on this investigation. We have a major incident with potential to develop into a terrorist investigation. Or possible criminal negligence by an automaker or one of its suppliers. That’s FBI jurisdiction, and we don’t have time to argue.”

  Immigration and Customs Enforcement was an agency with a broader mission than its name suggested—even if the FBI agent wanted the ICE guys to cede everything to her. ICE was the second-largest law enforcement agency in the Federal government after the FBI, though it didn’t have the long history of the Bureau. It was put together from other agencies under the Patriot Act after 9/11. Anything that crossed US borders was ICE jurisdiction, from trafficked people or drugs to cybercrimes committed through the Internet. Kinsella was about to take another shot at Jahn, but she caught Verrazzano’s eye. He shook his head a little, and she held her tongue.

  “If we’re going to pass anything on, we’d best know what the hell’s happening. Roula, give us the latest,” Callan said, “so Dom and Noelle are on the same page.”

  Haddad pushed a wisp of black hair away from her dark eyes. She pecked through a few screens on her laptop.

  “The pileups are enormous. We don’t have a figure on how many cars are involved so far, but the bulk of the damage is to Darien Motor Company vehicles. Other makes of car have been involved, but it looks like that’s only as collateral damage. The cause of each crash appears to be a Darien vehicle speeding out of control.” She glanced down the screens on her laptop. “First reports from NYPD and law enforcement in Jersey and Long Island are that they simply accelerated and wouldn’t stop. We don’t have a casualty number. But the hospitals are all jammed.”

  She turned her screen around. The browser showed a collection of grainy surveillance cameras, five columns across and four lines down, all running live. “Sixteen shots of the highways in the city, as well as bridges and tunnels to Jersey and the Island. Every one of them is just chaos. Totally shut down.”

  Even from the other end of the conference table, Verrazzano noted the unmoving dashes of black on the screens, the dead laid out flat in the roadways, like minus signs representing their subtraction from the sum of the living.

  “NYPD just can’t get through to where all the accidents happened,” Callan said. “Because they happened everywhere. It’s the same for the ambulances. If someone’s hurt too bad to be treated on the spot, they’re—well, they’re dying right where they are.”

  The FBI woman drummed her fingers on the back of Haddad’s chair. “Why would all these Dariens suddenly go out of control?”

  “I witnessed a big pileup out in Queens, and I was able to survey the streets from the elevated line of the subway on the way toward Manhattan,” Verrazzano said. “There were plenty of Dariens that didn’t crash. The older ones, I think. The ones that did crash looked pretty new to me.”

  “Does that seem right to you, Roula? Is that confirmed by what you’re seeing?” Callan gestured for Haddad to scan the screens. He leaned over her as she tapped her keyboard. “Continue, Dom.”

  “If we want to know how big this might be,” Verrazzano said, “let’s see how many Dariens have been sold in the Metro area over the last year or so.”

  Callan nodded at Haddad. She tapped at her computer. “About one hundred fifty thousand. In New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.”

  “This thing happened at about six AM. That’s pretty early for commuters and too early for people taking their kids to school. Let’s say thirty thousand of those cars were on the road and went out of control. Even if only half of them were going fast enough to cause a fatal crash, that’s a lot of dead people.”

  The weight of the death toll silenced them a moment. Then Kinsella cleared her throat. “I just don’t see why.”

  The FBI woman hammered her fist down. “It’s terrorism. What’s so damned difficult to grasp here?”

  “If it’s terrorism, it’s a lot more complex in preparation than anything we’ve faced before,” Ve
rrazzano said.

  “Those bastards are getting smarter all the time. Technology makes everything easier. Except stopping them.”

  “It could be a flaw in the cars,” Kinsella said. “The car companies have a track record of detecting a problem with one of their parts, then failing to disclose it. They don’t want the expense of a big recall to fix things. They figure it’s less costly to allow a certain number of people to die and then pay compensation to their relatives.”

  “So the terrorists are Darien? One of the biggest motor companies in the world?” Jahn’s eyes were violent, then suddenly they were full of satisfaction, so that Verrazzano wondered if she had reached out and slapped him so fast that he had missed it. “Let’s get real here. A faulty part couldn’t cause this. If the brakes were going to fail or the accelerator pedal was going to jam, it would be random. It wouldn’t happen in thousands of cars all at the same time.”

  “You’re right,” Verrazzano said. “So it’s got to be the software.”

  Haddad looked up from her screen. “It’s possible. We have no idea what’s inside the box with a car’s internal computer. Remember when it turned out Wolfwagen was programming its cars to beat emissions tests? The EPA didn’t figure it out for years because regulators are not computer programmers. They don’t go through every line of code in a car’s computer to check it, and even if they did, it wouldn’t mean anything to them. The government ends up taking all this stuff on trust.”

  “You shouldn’t trust a used car dealer, and I guess you shouldn’t trust a new car company.” Kinsella laughed.

  “Roula’s right that we don’t know what’s inside the box. But we do know it can be hacked from a remote location,” Verrazzano said. “There’s a small possibility that the company made a mistake in the software. But at least we know where to start.”

  “We go to Darien,” Kinsella said.

  “We go to Darien.” Jahn jabbed a finger at her own chest. “Most of the cars Darien sells in the US are manufactured domestically. That makes this an FBI case.”

  “Hold on there, Gina.” Callan turned his big Texas A&M class ring around the fourth finger on his left hand. “Granted the FBI may be the lead on this case. But there’s definitely going to be ICE jurisdiction here.”

  She rolled her head side to side. “How?”

  Haddad spoke up. “If it’s a hacker of some sort, it’s likely to be a major organization. It isn’t going to be some guy out in the woods of Idaho. The car companies have pretty good security on their systems. We might even be looking at cyber warfare by a foreign government. That means there was probably a cross-border element to this.” Everything that went through US borders was a case for ICE. Even if it did cross that border in a fiber-optic cable or a wireless signal.

  The FBI woman set her hands on her hips and spread her elbows wide. “I’m going to insist on this. FBI leads.”

  Verrazzano walked down the length of the table and stared into Jahn’s eyes. “I don’t care about jurisdiction. When this crash happened, I got out of my car and went to the nearest injured person I could find. I reached his wife on the phone before the cellular networks went down. When he died, I told her he was gone. Then I let her talk to me some more.”

  Jahn raised her hands in frustration. She broke the stare with Verrazzano and looked toward Callan for support. “We don’t have time for—”

  “His name was Anthony Gibson. His wife’s name is Miranda Gibson. She’s pregnant with Anthony’s child. He’d just been fired this morning. He was on his way to sell the car because he couldn’t afford the payments on it.”

  “Look, Special Agent—”

  “Anthony and Miranda didn’t have shit.” Verrazzano moved closer to Jahn. He lowered his voice. “But now they’ve got me.”

  Jahn’s face told Verrazzano that she had backed down—for now. The light infiltrated the cover of hair across her cheek. Beneath it, her skin was marked with a deep scar and smaller wounds around it. She saw Verrazzano note the disfigurement and brought her hand up to cover it.

  Heavy, fast footfalls sounded across the floor outside the room. Special Agent Bill Todd came through the door. For a moment, the ICE agent was puzzled by the silence. Then he gestured toward the remote control on the table beside Haddad. “You guys need to turn on the TV.”

  Callan fumbled with the remote, waving it at the television on the wall. The screen flipped to life. CBS showed the chaos outside their studios on Sixth Avenue.

  “No, go to CNN,” Todd said. “Channel forty-two.”

  “Why in hell do we need to—?” Callan thumbed through to the cable news channel and halted, staring at the picture. On Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, a double-decker tourist bus tangled with wrecked passenger cars. He peered closer. “Those are Dariens. Is this happening everywhere, for Christ’s sake?” He flipped to CNBC. The screen showed the streets of a city engulfed in rioting. A storefront burned, silhouetting the figures running in front of it, carrying boxes looted from the shop. The sun was yet to rise. He scanned the information at the bottom of the screen. There was so much news that morning, it seemed the crawl line was as fast and out of control as a Darien. “It’s LA,” Bill Todd said. “After the cars crashed, people went out and—and so this.” He gestured at the rioting.

  “It is coast-to-coast.” Haddad worked her keyboard. “Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Houston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Columbus, Atlanta. I don’t know if it’s everywhere, but it’s near enough.”

  “There’s something else.” Todd reached out and touched Verrazzano’s shoulder. “It’s Tom Frisch.”

  “Tom who?” Jahn frowned.

  “A guy who owned a security company. Tried to release poison gas into the UN building last year,” Callan said. “Dom arrested him. He’s held under special incarceration regulations at our detention center in Brooklyn. He hasn’t spilled much, but we think there’s still a lot he can help us with.”

  “Like what?”

  Callan glanced at Verrazzano. He knew what the SAC’s lowered brows meant: like the name of the man who organized and financed Frisch’s attempt on the president’s life at the UN. But even Callan didn’t know how much Verrazzano wanted to catch that guy. Frisch was the only person who understood that.

  Jahn folded her arms across her chest. “What the hell does this have to do with—?”

  “Darien?” Todd said. “Frisch says he knows what happened this morning. Knows why it happened, I mean.”

  “Let’s go,” Jahn said.

  “He says he’ll only talk to Dom.”

  “No use trying to drive to Brooklyn.” Verrazzano looked out of the window, at the crashed cars and the traffic and the meandering pedestrians on the side street. He smiled at Jahn. “Let’s you and me take a walk.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The detention center mostly held regular criminals pulled in by city cops off the streets of Brooklyn. A couple of floors were set aside for ICE to pen suspected illegal immigrants before they were processed through to the agency’s main holding center sixty miles north of the city. Then there was Frisch. His crime would have been so damaging to the state were it to have succeeded that he was in a corridor all to himself, with no record of his whereabouts even in the general ICE computer system. Frisch hadn’t shaved since Verrazzano arrested him. His beard was down past his collarbone, brown with dry strands of gray curling against the grain. His hair had grown out too. He was as unkempt as he had been when he was a SEAL undercover in Iraq and Afghanistan. Verrazzano didn’t allow him a razor or scissors, to be sure that Frisch would never be able to slip his guards and meld in with the other prisoners. So too he was denied a uniform. He wore denim pants, a gray T-shirt, and orange Crocs that Verrazzano bought for him at a charity shop. He sat calmly and folded his hands on the table.

  At Verrazzano’s side, Jahn smoldered. “Okay, Mister Frisch, we understand you have information related to the mass crash of Darien vehicles on the streets this morning.” She s
tarted the audio recorder on her phone and set it on the table.

  Frisch’s beard stirred. There was a smile under there. Verrazzano saw it in his eyes. For a man facing execution, Frisch looked very Zen. He reached out with a sudden movement and took the phone. He shut off the recorder. When he thumbed the home button at the bottom of the phone, a picture of Jahn and a man with a shaved head and a goatee came up behind the app icons. They were smiling and hugging close. “That’s sweet, ain’t it?”

  Verrazzano took the phone and handed it back to Jahn. “What do you want to tell us?”

  Frisch stretched his arms above his head. “I asked you to come see me, Sergeant Major Verrazzano. Why’d you bring the soccer mom?”

  Jahn ignored him and wiped the screen of her phone against her jacket. She glanced at Verrazzano. Her eyes said, Sergeant Major?

  It happened every time Verrazzano came to interrogate Frisch. The prisoner tried to take him back to their days in Colonel Wyatt’s rogue Special Forces unit. Back to the hideout in Beirut where Verrazzano found Frisch after it all went wrong. Sergeant Major was Captain Frisch’s reminder that only the officer class was entitled to have all the information.

  Frisch winked to let Verrazzano know he could follow his thoughts. There were teeth showing through the beard now, a broader smile or a snarl maybe.

  “What do you have, Frisch?” Verrazzano said.

  “A ticket out, Sergeant Major.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “We’ll damn well agree on it right now.”

  “If you have information about what happened today with the Darien cars, it will certainly count in your favor, if you share it with me now.”

  “It ‘counts in my favor’ if I pass the salt from the left and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ What I’ve got for you merits a different grade of reward altogether. It gets me out of this hole. It gets me a passport and a ticket to Caracas, where you aren’t ever going to come after me.”