“I understand. You keep your part of the bargain and I’ll keep mine. Now let me go before he suspects something.”
CHAPTER 99
WISE ASS
We entered a smaller building that overlooked a field of metal doors, loading devices, ladders and yellow nuclear radiation warning signs posted everywhere. This time, instead of descending, we rode an elevator up two floors to an office with floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the nuclear, industrial garden out back.
I still had Frank on the phone and a decent cell signal. “Sam, plug in your earbud so I can monitor your conversation and keep in touch with you privately.” I plugged in the earbud and slipped the phone into my breast pocket with the phone’s camera lense facing out and above the lip of the pocket so Frank could see whatever I saw.
Tilson led us to a group of people gathered around someone’s desk. “Hi guys, can I have a word with Ben?” The others moved away leaving a thirtyish male with black hair, a mustache and beard.
“Director Tilson, to what do I owe this pleasure?” Yolkum said with a smirk.
“Ben, these are Al, Gary and Sam from the NRC doing a routine inspection.” Al again checked her clipboard. “What’s that blinking on your screen. Is there a problem?”
“We’ve been having an intermittent problem with the cooling water in storage unit #5. Nothing to worry about. We’re pumping more water in now.”
Frank spoke in my ear. “Sound familiar? Ask him what’s causing the problem and how many fuel rods they’ve got there.”
Now I slipped off my glasses thoughtfully. If I had a pipe and smoking were allowed, I’d be smoking one now. “Mr. Yolkum, what seems to be the cause of the problem?”
“We’re not sure. I have the maintenance team checking it out now.”
“OK. Just for our records, how many rods do you have stored there?”
“We have 538, mostly used, but there are some new as well.”
“And what’s the capacity?”
“If you’re from the NRC, you should know that the capacity is also 538.”
Yolkum was getting a bit testy and I didn’t want to raise suspicion. Sometimes the best defense was…“I knew it was 538. I wanted to see if you knew it.”
“Hmm, am I being interrogated here?”
Frank in my ear. “He seems pretty defensive. This could be our boy and maybe our problem.”
Al sensed the creeping tension and decided to play good cop. “I see here that you’ve been here six years and received two commendations and a promotion.”
Ben smiled. “Yes, I received best all-around camper two years in a row. Now I’m a ‘manager,’ which means I work more hours and get no overtime pay. So, yes I’ve been a good boy.”
Tilson interjected. “No need to get hostile, Ben. These people are doing their jobs just like us. And just like us, their priority is safety.” Tilson gave Ben a conspiratorial look to try to calm him or to get him to cool it.
“Yes, Director. I apologize for my sarcasm. Staring at these screens all day, you have to keep a sense of humor or you’ll have a meltdown. Ha, ha.”
“Not funny,” Al said and she meant it.
Tilson didn’t like where this was headed. “Thanks, Ben. We’ll be moving along now. Please update me on anything the maintenance team finds.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Tilson physically directed us outside into the hall. “Sorry about that. He’s a bit of a wise-ass but a hard worker.”
“In our business, we used to call that a toxic personality. It can infect and kill an organization. Of more concern is his cavalier and maybe dangerous attitude.” My phone rang interrupting us with its Star Wars ringtone. The ringtone was my son Evan’s idea of funny. I kept it even though I had a new phone. “Sorry, I have to take this call.”
Frank was shouting in my ear. “I don’t like this guy. I did a quick search and apparently his parents are from Chechnya. Maybe a connection.”
“But if he was going to sabotage the nuclear fuel storage, why would he telegraph it with this apparent problem.”
Frank now went into his Einstein mode. “Two possibilities. One, there actually is a problem, which I doubt. And two, he’s providing cover for what he actually plans to do.”
“Wait, I don’t get it. What do you mean?”
“If he is planning to sabotage the storage by draining the coolant, he could do it and claim it was just a recurrence of this mysterious intermittent problem. Before anyone could figure out that it was a terrorist act, he’d be buying time to make sure the plan was fully carried out and perhaps make a getaway. Like I said, he’s got cover and guys like Tilson would buy it right up until the point of disaster.”
“OK. Now I get it. So now what?”
CHAPTER 100
MICHELLE RETURNS
Little gave Michelle some money so she could take the T from nearby Central Square to Harvard Square. She went up the escalator into Harvard Square and jogged back toward the house. She was only away for maybe a total of ninety minutes between being with the Feds, hopping the T and running back. She hoped it wasn’t too much time to raise suspicion.
The only problem was that when she emerged from the T into Harvard Square, LaSalam was finishing his evening stroll at the same time. He saw her come up the escalator and jog down Mass Ave. Her face was bruised. What could that mean, he wondered. She did not look back and did not see him.
She jogged down Mass Ave to Plymouth Street and turned right. She could take Plymouth back to the bike path by the Charles and circle back to the house the way she originally ran, just in case someone was watching from the house.
By the time she got back, it was almost 9:00. She was covered in sweat, which may have been more from tension than from the run. They shared a bathroom down the hall that was thankfully empty. She looked at her bruised eye in the mirror. It was already swollen. By tomorrow, she’d need black and blue makeup to hide it. Not funny. She took a ten-minute, long for her, hot shower and then finished making the water as cold as it could get. The cold made her skin tingle and she felt more alert. Much of her tension drained, replaced by intense focus. She had to pull this off. A lot depended on it.
CHAPTER 101
INDIAN POINT
Al, Gary and I huddled in a corner. Frank was still on the phone and could see us through the cell phone camera.
Al started. “I think we need to lock this guy’s ass in a room and interrogate him. Even if we don’t get answers, isolating him may be enough to stop him at least here.”
“I’ve had Frank on the phone this whole time. Here, I’ll put him on speaker.”
“Gentlemen and lady. We have a bigger problem than Mr. Yolkum here. If there are more like him out there, and we have every reason to believe there are, we need to act now in a way that might stop all or most of them.”
“Even the idea of ‘most’ scares me. How do we get them all?” I said. “Gary, you’ve been quiet. Any ideas?”
“How about a virus?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I’m thinking about something like the Stuxnet virus that set back the Iranian nuclear program for a couple of years. If we had something like that and could deploy it to all the facilities to block any tampering with the cooling systems for long enough to round up these dudes, then we might stop this.”
I put on my geek hat. “That’s a big ‘if.’ First, something as sophisticated as Stuxnet probably took a team of world-class coders months to write. Then it needed an inside conspirator to plant it. I don’t see how that’s possible in days much less the few hours we have.”
Frank crackled to life. “You don’t realize the powerful resource you have, Sam.”
“What’s that?”
“Me! I can access the kernels of the Stuxnet class of viruses. I’ve also joined some of the best black ops, hacker groups in the last few days in preparation for something like this. Maybe with Gary and Bart’s help, together with a few of my hacker fri
ends, we can cobble together something workable in a couple of hours.”
“Wait, how do you just join hacker groups and make friends in a few days?”
“Well I hacked my way in of course. When they saw what I could do and how fast I could do it, we became fast friends. I had to help them ‘obtain’ some classified docs and steal a few million dollars, but that seems like a small price to pay at this point. Time’s a wastin’. What’s the call?”
“OK. I should know better than to question you. Why don’t you get started and then we’ll need to figure out how to deploy.”
“I already started about five minutes ago when Gary came up with this brilliant idea. Remember, I can multitask. Bart’s on it and Gary, check your tablet for the login and check out a task. We have a checkout-checkin list for the thousand or so tasks that the coders will need to do.”
“I think I already know the answer to how you’re doing this. You’ve got hundreds of coders already working on it, plus you could probably work hundreds of the tasks yourself.”
“You’re catching on. But I have to ask you, Al and Little to work the deployment problem. We can get the code ready, but we can’t get inside some of these air-gapped nuclear systems. You’d need authorization and maybe even physical intervention to get it done.”
Al had been tapping her pen on her clipboard this whole time. “Air-gapped. What the hell is that?”
Frank was back in professor mode. “It means that to protect the systems from intrusion, they are not connected to the Internet or any outside network. Hence, to plant the Stuxnet virus, we had to have a confederate inside and plug a flash drive into their air-gapped system to plant it. After the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York was hacked by the Iranians, as a precaution, some essential infrastructure, like the nuke plants, were taken offline or air-gapped. The move was designed to prevent that same kind of intrusion that could take down the grid or worse.”
“OK. I get it. So we may need to physically hand-carry and insert whatever Frank and his boys come up with. We’d need Little and his high-level connections to get that kind of access.”
“Correction—Frank’s boys and girls. Getting these plants to allow someone, even with DHS ID, to walk in the door and plug something into their systems is going to be at best tricky and at worst, a bureaucratic nightmare. Well, I wanted to see where Little was at anyway. Let’s call him.”
CHAPTER 102
UPDATE
“Madame President, we have Director Little on the line with an update,” Hager said.
They were back to the Situation Room, looking at a dozen screens on the front wall, drone camera views of the Cambridge Surveillance, Indian Point and several other nuclear facilities. Hager pressed a button to put Little on speaker. “Director Little, tell me you have some good news.”
His face appeared in the corner of one of the screens. “Madame President, gentlemen. As you can see, we have JFK Street under surveillance in Cambridge. We believe this is the current command center for the Leopard’s next move. We have a cooperative collaborator inside. We’re waiting for the Leopard to return so we can attempt a shutdown of their plan and seize the conspirators.”
“When do you expect him to return and for this whole thing to go down?”
“We believe he will return in two to three hours. We have surveillance on him now at his hotel.”
“I’ve been briefed on the general nuclear threat. Any progress there?”
“Yes. Our current theory, and I say ‘theory’ because we don’t have hard evidence, is that their specific plan is to simultaneously drain the cooling water from the fuel rod storage facilities at some or all of our nuclear plants and perhaps, even ones in France.”
“What happens if they do that?”
“Perhaps somebody in the room could better answer that, but I believe the fuel rods would overheat causing a kind of meltdown. I’m not sure if you would have explosions, but you could get uncontrollable fires in the storage areas spewing tons of toxic radiation into the air.”
“How strong do you think this theory is?”
“Our analysts give it a seventy percent chance of being correct.”
“I think my predecessor was only 50/50 when he launched the raid on Bin Laden. Doesn’t look like we have much choice other than to go after it. If we’re wrong, we haven’t lost anything other than the opportunity to stop the actual threat. What’s your plan to stop them?”
Little was glad she was using “we” in describing the situation. He felt like he had already stretched his neck out about is far as it could go and the rope holding up the guillotine above him was fraying rapidly. “We have a team of world-class coders writing a virus to stop the cooling system tampering–”
Hager interrupted. “Wait, have I got this right? You’re going to infect our nuclear facilities with a virus? Are you nuts?”
Well as a friend of Little’s once said, you’re never really in the game until you feel the elephant standing on your chest. He was feeling it now. “Secretary Hager, this is a friendly virus meant to rig our systems in order to prevent tampering from inside the facilities.”
“OK. So this is more like a ‘vaccine.’ I can understand that, but who’s tampering inside our facilities? I thought by the president’s executive order last year, we had taken these facilities offline to prevent tampering?”
“You’re now getting to the heart of it General, I mean Secretary. The facilities are offline, so the only way to tamper is if someone at each facility at the controls manually drains the cooling systems. Based on Sunborn and his team’s interviews at Indian Point, we believe the Leopard has recruited or coerced those individuals at each facility to manually do the deed.”
“How the fuck, excuse my language, would he have been able to do that?”
“His pattern is to make both promises and threats to get what he wants. If they have family, those people are in danger unless the local operator cooperates. Just like 9/11 when Bin Laden used multiple trained pilots, LaSalam is using multiple trained nuclear operators on site.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly. So our task is to not only develop the vaccine as you call it, but to physically deploy it in the next few hours. That’s where you come in. I need unfettered access to every nuclear facility within the next three hours. My agents are going to hopefully show up with the vaccine in hand. I need to get in—no bullshit, to get this done. I don’t know how to cut through all the screenings and security checks that quickly. I need you to make it happen somehow.”
Hager blew out a deep breath. “Madame President, do we have your permission to move on this?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Do what you have to do.”
CHAPTER 103
BACK EARLY
At 9:30, Michelle Hadar went downstairs to the office, her hair still wet, combed back and smelling sweetly of rosemary and lemon shampoo. She didn’t always wear it in the US, but felt she should put on her hijab. A few of her team were already back at their desks preparing for the big event. “Jack, you’re back early.”
Jack was a Harvard computer sci student who looked like he was too young to shave. “I just wanted to run a few simulations before we go live. I mean this is a big deal—the event we’ve been working toward, right?”
“That’s right. I appreciate your dedication. No wonder you’re top of your class. If, I should say ‘when,’ we’re successful, this will look good on your resume too.” Why was she still encouraging her team? She had to remind herself she was playing a role in a play where the ending was still to be written. She couldn’t afford to deviate from her character until the last minute or all could be lost.
“I’m seeing some peculiar behavior at our Indian Point simulation. It looks like someone is already lowering and raising the coolant levels in the fuel storage units. What could that mean?”
“Probably one of the local personnel just doing a dry-run. Remember, this is all just a simulation for the DOD. None of it is real.”
“I did say that and still mean it. We just can’t drive ourselves crazy when little anomalies appear. Part of the big event simulations is to see how different people and systems react here and at the local level. Real people at the nuclear power plants are participating in this drill. So just keep an eye on that activity. As long as it doesn’t upset our schedule, don’t worry about it.”
Jack stroked his hairless chin. “OK. You’re the boss.” He swiveled his chair back around to focus on his screen. A little red dot was blinking on his map of Indian Point.
Michelle straightened her hijab, took a deep breath and walked into her office.
CHAPTER 104
THE VACCINE
Now I was getting really anxious. “How’s the virus code coming? Oh, by the way, Little asked that we call it a ‘vaccine’ for political reasons.”
Frank’s image flickered on my phone’s screen. “Vaccine, eh? I guess it’s not politically correct to infect your own infrastructure with a virus, but a vaccine is OK. Politicians drive me nuts. It’s just words.”
“Well as somebody famous once said, ‘Words matter.’ But I don’t think we have time for a political or philological discussion right now. Where are we?”
“I think we’re close, but we need to do a little more testing.”
There’s that testing issue again, but this time the cost of getting it wrong was literally apocalyptic. “Can you use some of your superpowers to speed it up? I mean, can’t you do hundreds if not thousands of test trials at once? I think we’re running out of time.”
“If I have nine women work on it, can a woman have her baby in one month instead of waiting nine months? Look Sam, the tricky part of this whole operation is security. Because we are using hackers and coders from your office to Russia to me. We can’t do it offline. So we are creating a lot of maybe noticeable activity online. Even though we are using megabit encryption, we still create a ripple in the pond that would be noticeable if anyone, like the Leopard’s team, is looking. So we have to limit our testing to a low enough frequency and bandwidth to avoid detection, if that makes sense. It’s really more complicated than that, but I wanted to keep it simple for you.” He winked.
Not So Dead: A Sam Sunborn Novel Page 22
