She guarded her boss almost as fiercely as his chief of staff, Lester Jackson. Jackson was a Washington insider who’d latched onto the president’s coattails early on and never relinquished his grip.
While she had a support staff of several dozen under her, one of the tasks Eunice insisted upon performing herself was giving the president his coffee when he strode through her office on the way to his. She’d just finished adding milk—the First Lady insisted on two percent, but it was actually whole milk poured into a two percent carton—when her fax line rang.
It wasn’t without precedent, but faxes were somewhat archaic in today’s world so the machine usually sat mute for weeks on end. When it had spit out a single page into the tray, Eunice scanned the contents, bewilderment turning to genuine concern as she read.
This had to be a hoax, she thought.
But then how did the sender get this line? It wasn’t listed in the White House directory because of all the prank faxes sent to the president, along with the prank letters and e-mails. Those were all screened off-site. Only a few dozen people had easy access to the fax machine behind her desk.
What if this wasn’t a hoax? The very idea sickened her. She sat heavily, barely noticing the hot coffee she’d spilled in her lap.
Just then, Les Jackson strode in. His hair was frosted at the temples, and his eyes were starting to retreat into wrinkled pouches, but he still moved like a much younger man, as if the stress and strain of his job invigorated him rather than wore him down.
“You okay?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Eunice wordlessly held up the fax, forcing Jackson to reach across her desk to get it. He was known as a speed-reader and had the single page finished in just a few seconds.
“This is bogus,” was his opinion. “Nobody can get that information. And the rest is just typical jihadist drivel. Where did it come from?”
He let the piece of paper flutter to her desk.
“It just came through on my fax, Mr. Jackson.” Though she’d known him for years, she insisted on formality with her superiors. Jackson did nothing to dissuade her from that particular habit.
He considered that for just a moment, then dismissed it. “Crackpot with your fax number. Bound to happen.”
“Is someone sending you dirty faxes, Eunice?” the president asked with a knowing chuckle.
Two years into his first term hadn’t taken much of a toll on the man. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and such a captivating voice that audiences were still enthralled with him even when they disagreed with his policies.
Eunice Wosniak shot to her feet. “No, Mr. President. It’s nothing like that. I, eh ...” Her voice simply trailed off.
The president picked up the fax, pulled a pair of cheater glasses from the breast pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, and settled them on his aquiline nose. He read it almost as quickly as his top aide. Unlike Jackson, the president blanched, his eyes widening. He reached into his hip pocket and removed a piece of plastic about the size of a credit card. It had been exchanged with a similar one by an NSA courier as soon as he’d left the presidential apartment. It was a morning routine that never varied.
He broke open a seal and compared the numbers printed on the card inside with those that had been written on the fax. His hands began to tremble.
“Mr. President?” Jackson asked with considerable concern.
The little plastic card was nicknamed “the biscuit.” Issued to the president every day since shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it contained a series of numbers that was generated randomly at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, by a secure computer. This was the presidential authentication code to launch nuclear weapons.
Without doubt, these numbers were the most closely guarded secrets in the United States.
And someone had just faxed today’s code to the Oval Office.
“Les, call together the National Security Council. I want them here as fast as humanly possible.” While someone possessing the codes couldn’t possibly launch a nuclear weapon, the very idea that the biscuit codes were no longer secret was the greatest breach of security in U.S. history. This alone called into question the level of protection of all other areas of national defense.
It took several hours to get the NSC assembled in the Situation Room, a windowless bunker deep under the White House. Because of prior travel arrangements, the only people in on the meeting were the vice president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and, by special invitation, the head of the NSA and of the CIA.
“Lady and Gentlemen,” the president started, “we have a crisis on our hands the likes of which this nation has never faced before.”
He passed out copies of the letter but continued speaking. “A little over two hours ago that fax was sent to Eunice Wosniak, my personal secretary. The authentication code on it is genuine. We will have to wait and see if the threat is genuine as well. As for the demands, they are something we might be forced to discuss.”
“Hold on a minute,” the commanding general of the NSA said. “This isn’t possible.”
“I know,” the president responded. “And yet here we are. The code comes from a random-number generator, and all personnel who handle the biscuit have gone through a Yankee White background check, right?”
“Yes, sir. It is totally secure. And no one other than you ever actually sees the numbers. I’ll check on the status of the courier. Was the seal on the biscuit broken?”
“Intact.”
“This is impossible,” the general repeated.
The vice president spoke up. “This psycho says he is going to shut down the power to Troy, New York, for one minute at noon. Shouldn’t we warn someone? And why Troy, of all places?”
“Because it’s close enough to New York City to get our attention but small enough that when he diverts that much electricity, it won’t overload the grid and cause a cascade shutdown like the blackout of ’03.” This came from Les Jackson, who had been a lobbyist for a utility umbrella organization. “And if we warn them, they’re going to want to know how we knew. If this is legit, do you want the administration facing questions like that?”
“Oh. Right.” The vice president had been brought on to balance the ticket and not for his keen intellect.
“This isn’t just some computer hacker,” said Fiona Katamora, the secretary of state. She’d been the national security adviser in the previous administration and had been tapped for this more public office because she was quite simply one of the most accomplished people on the planet. “The demands read like Osama bin Laden’s Christmas wish list.”
She read from the fax: “The United States will immediately announce a halt of all military and nonmilitary aid to the State of Israel and will henceforth provide the same amount of money to the Palestinian Authority and to the Hamas leaders on the Gaza Strip. All prisoners currently held at Guantánamo Bay will be released immediately. All U.S. and NATO troops must leave Iraq by the end of this June and be out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. All military aid to Pakistan will be immediately halted. American military bases in Kuwait and Qatar are to be dismantled by the end of the year. The president will formally condemn the building of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and will further condemn the banning of headscarves for Muslim women in France and any other European country which enacts such a ban. All Muslim groups currently listed internationally as terror groups will have that designation lifted. There will be no further sanctions against the nation of Iran, and all such sanctions currently in place will be lifted by the end of the year.
“What he’s telling us,” she said, “is that we are to cede the war on terror. I find it very telling that he mentions Iran.”
“Why’s that?”
“Sunni and Shi’a Muslims do not get along, and the one thing most Arab states agree on is that a bottled-up Iran, with its Shi’a brand of Islam, is in their best interest. But
this guy wants our hands off everyone, as if to say whatever differences exist between the two groups is an internal thing and they will handle it themselves.”
“Obviously we can’t do any of these things,” the vice president said ponderously.
“What gets me too,” Fiona Katamora continued as though he hadn’t spoken, “are the time lines that are spelled out. This isn’t the rant of some deranged jihadi sitting in a Waziri cave. This has been carefully thought out. Each deadline is doable from a practical perspective and, while politically unpalatable, isn’t unfeasible.”
“We can’t stop giving aid to Israel,” the CIA director said.
“We can,” Fiona retorted evenly, not raising her voice the way her counterpart had. “We choose to continue funding them because it is in our best interest. If that were no longer the case, we can turn off the money taps anytime we want.”
“But . . .”
“Listen, if this is legitimate, the game’s changed completely. We are no longer in control. Some group out there appears to have unlimited access to our most guarded secrets. At the push of a button they can shut down power grids. Think about that. Think about a nationwide power outage that goes on for weeks or months. Or an air traffic control system that we no longer rely on. Every plane in the country grounded indefinitely. Could this person override the safeties at the nation’s nuclear power plants and cause them all to melt down? I think there are physical safeties in place for that ... But you get the idea.”
“Any suggestions on what do we do?” the president asked in a voice much quieter than he intended.
“We find the person responsible and crucify them,” the veep thundered.
“Where did the fax originate?” the man from the NSA asked.
“Gentlemen,” Fiona said sharply, “do you honestly think whoever masterminded the theft of the presidential authentication codes is going to be caught using traditional police techniques? This guy didn’t walk into a Kinko’s on Mass Ave. to send his message. That signal bounced around the planet for a couple of hours before it reached Eunice’s office. We’ll never trace it. We need to look at this from the other end. Who benefits from this?”
“Al-Qaeda tops the list,” the beribboned admiral from the Joint Chiefs replied.
“Does this feel like something they’d do?” Fiona shot back. “If they had this kind of power, they’d launch an all-out cyberattack that would drive us back into the Stone Age. There would be no demands or warning. No, it’s someone else. Someone new.”
“Any ideas?” asked the CIA director.
“I’m afraid that’s up to you.”
“My first instinct was al-Qaeda too, but you make a compelling argument against them. I’ll talk to my people to see if there is anyone else out there with the wherewithal to pull off something like this.”
“Let’s say they do kill the power in Troy, New York,” Les Jackson said. “What’s our response? What do we do? It’d be political suicide to cut off aid to Israel or even to announce such an intention. Same goes for just releasing the prisoners from Gitmo.”
Fiona Katamora raked her fingers through her raven hair in a sign of frustration. “This isn’t about politics, Les. We’ve been handed a demonstration that tells us we are at this person’s mercy. He has cracked the most secure code in the world and flaunted it in our faces. We either give in to the demands or face the consequences as a nation, not as a political party or as a presidential administration. Do we cave or do we all go down together?” She turned to face the commander in chief. “That’s the question, Mr. President.”
An aide knocked at the door and entered when the president called, “Come.”
“Sir, just to give you an update. The return number printed on the fax is bogus. No such number is listed anywhere in the world. And the White House switchboard has no record of the call ever coming in.”
“The call never even came in? Did your secretary crack up?” the NSA director asked the president. “Is this her idea of a joke?”
The president didn’t know what to say, but he was hoping against hope that his longtime and most trusted secretary was mentally ill and had pulled off this cruel hoax.
“One more thing,” the aide continued. “There was a blackout in Troy, New York, at noon that lasted for precisely sixty seconds. No other areas were affected even though the local utility supplies power to the outlying regions. So far, they have no reason why power faded or why it came back.”
“Dear God,” someone said. “This is real.”
Fiona kept reading from the bottom of the fax. “These are small, benign demonstrations of our abilities. We are not barbarians. We cherish life, but if even one of our demands is not met, we will cripple your country. Planes will rain from the sky, refineries will explode, factories will idle, and electricity will be a thing of your past.
“In time, all people of the earth will convert to the one true faith, but we are willing to allow you to coexist with us for now.” She looked up. “It’s real.”
19
SMITH HAD MADE HIS MISTAKE A WEEK EARLIER. HE’D finally relented to MacD’s relentless calls for a proof-of-life video link to his daughter. And because he believed that Lawless was still under his control, he was lazy when it came to computer security. The video link only lasted a few tearful seconds, but Mark and Eric backtracked its source with ease.
Prior to that, the Corporation had made no headway in its investigation of Gunawan Bahar.
As Cabrillo had suspected, the kidnappers hadn’t taken Pauline Lawless far from where she’d been abducted in New Orleans. In fact, she was being held within the city’s notorious Lower Ninth Ward, the area so heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina that much of it remained in ruins. It was a smart tactical decision—since the composition of the area had been so disrupted, strangers had a better chance of blending in and not arousing suspicion.
Cabrillo, Lawless, and Franklin Lincoln flew into Houston, where the Corporation maintained a safe house. It was one of a dozen they kept in port cities all over the world and was used primarily to store weapons and equipment that they might otherwise have trouble getting through customs. Even corporate jets are subject to searches, and while officials can be bribed in many airports around the globe, it wasn’t a good idea to try it in the United States.
They rented a nondescript sedan from Hertz, plundered the vaultlike room in the safe house for gear, and were on the road for the Big Easy moments later. They drove the three hundred and fifty miles at the speed limit, with every traffic rule followed to the letter. Cabrillo had Lawless drive. It wasn’t because of his arm, which was back to about eighty percent. He wanted MacD’s mind on something other than his six-year-old baby girl.
Their first stop was Lawless’s parents’ home. The terrified couple who had been watching the child had been told by the kidnappers that any attempt to alert the police would force them to kill her. They had been living with that fear for weeks. As much as MacD had wanted to call them, he agreed with Cabrillo that it was possible one of the kidnappers had stayed in their home or bugged their phone.
The home was in a neat subdivision with towering oaks draped in Spanish moss. Many of the homes were brick and had come through the hurricane unscathed. MacD parked well down the block and out of sight of his parents’ house and waited behind the wheel while Cabrillo and Linc went to check if the house was under observation. Both wore hard hats and blue jumpsuits that could easily pass for utility workers’ attire. Cabrillo carried a clipboard, Lincoln a toolbox.
There were no vans parked along the street, a favorite observation post, and no cars with overly tinted windows, another dead giveaway. All the lawns were well manicured. It was an important detail, because if a neighbor’s house had been commandeered by the kidnappers to keep an eye on the Lawlesses, they wouldn’t expose themselves by riding a John Deere around the property.
They spent fifteen minutes checking gas meters but at the same time always watching the target house for drape
s being moved by someone lurking inside. The few cars that passed them on the quiet street paid no attention and didn’t slow or stop.
“I think we’re good,” Linc said.
Cabrillo had to agree. He scribbled something on his notepad in big bold letters, and the two of them approached the door. The brass knocker had been recently polished and the stairs swept, as if these small domestic chores could take the Lawlesses away from the pain they were feeling. He rapped loudly. A moment later an attractive woman in her mid-fifties opened the door.
He held up the clipboard where she could read it and asked, “Ma’am, we’ve had reports of gas leaks in this area. Have you had any trouble?”
On the clipboard was written: We’re here with MacD. Are you alone?
“Um, no. I mean, yes. No. No one’s here.” Then the reality hit her, and her voice raised two octaves. “You’re with MacD? He’s all right? Oh my gosh!” She turned to shout over her shoulder. “Mare! Mare, get in here. MacD’s okay.”
Juan gently but firmly bustled them inside and shut the door. An Irish setter came into the room to see what the commotion was, its feathered tail wagging excitedly.
“Mrs. Lawless, please keep your voice down. Were the men who took your granddaughter ever in this house?”
“What is it?” a male voice called from deeper in the home.
“No. Never. They grabbed her when I was watching her at a park near here. Brandy, down,” she said to the dog that was trying to lick Linc’s face. Linc ignored the dog and kept watching the bug detector as he swept the entryway. “They told me they would let her go soon but that if I contacted the police they would kill her. My husband and I have been sick with worry ever since.”
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