He chewed an antacid and tried to focus on Helsinki as his driver motored toward the private airport. His operatives had their orders, and it was up to them to come through like professionals.
Hope wasn’t a course of action, Graves knew, but he didn’t have any alternatives at the moment.
93
Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, VA. Monday, 8:54 p.m. ET.
Art Levitow shook Protégé’s hand. The scientist had a vice-like grip, which Protégé struggled to match. “Thank you, Robert. You showed up to the game a bit late, but you made it all possible. Be proud. It’s no exaggeration to say that you have done something great for the country and for the world.”
Protégé blushed slightly. The past couple of hours had disappeared in a flurry of activity. He had played gopher for one of the world’s most brilliant quantum physicists, who was assembling an unprecedented technological breakthrough in the dilapidated remnants of a 1950’s wind tunnel.
The Senior Quantum beam control algorithm, the same one that had dazzled SecDef and the Vice President of the United States during the top-secret demonstration in the Nevada desert just days earlier, was now successfully mated to one of the most powerful transmitters in existence.
All that remained was for those two major pieces to be mated with the third, and final, bit of technological wizardry, which was strapped down in the back of a cargo jet en route from Texas. The jet was minutes from touchdown at Langley Air Force Base.
Protégé had no idea how Stalwart had worked out those details—getting permission to land on an Air Force base took a great deal of pull, but Stalwart had somehow made it happen. It was a very risky move, but it was also epic irony: the government was about to aid and abet its own destruction.
“Thanks, Art,” Protégé said. “I’m convinced that we’ll save lives in the long run. I just hope it works like you guys say it will.”
“Me too. Otherwise, it could be a shit show.” Levitow smiled grimly, then suddenly looked at his watch in alarm. “You should probably hit the road. You have a plane to catch.”
The two parted with an embrace. “See you soon,” Protégé said.
“I hope so.”
94
Washington, DC. Monday, 8:54 p.m. ET.
“Are you stalking me?” Sam asked with a small smile as she answered another phone call from her deputy.
“Hell no. I’ve met your boyfriend,” Dan responded with a chuckle. “Speaking of whom, here’s an update.”
Talking in rapid, clipped tones, Dan filled Sam in on what he had learned over the past five minutes.
Within seconds of requesting the hostage rescue team, Dan saw two of the telephone numbers on his watch list become active.
One of them was the same number that Charlie Landers had dialed just minutes before.
Using specialized geo-location software to combine inputs from various cell phone networks, satellites, and terrestrial surveillance equipment, Dan had found five transmitting devices all clustered within two meters of the target’s cell phone location.
One was a car’s GPS navigation system. The other four radio-enabled devices were car tires. He explained that high-end tire manufacturers had begun embedding computer chips in every tire in order to track all sorts of product and consumer information. The chips responded to certain radio signals by emitting a response signal of their own.
It appeared that these particular tires were matched to a Bentley, registered to one Erwin Graves.
“Damn fine work! What about the other phone number?” she asked.
“I’m still working,” Dan replied, “but it’s definitely in the metro area.”
“Convenient. Maybe we’ll roll them all up together.”
“Let’s just take one impossible task at a time, shall we? And hurry, Sam. There’s not much time.”
95
Washington, DC. Monday, 8:58 p.m. ET.
Trojan received a pop-up alert on his laptop computer. He smiled as he read it, sipping a cup of Turkish coffee to help him stay awake at his post, monitoring the progress of the little virus he had created.
The message told him that the first successful hack into the US Federal Reserve Banking system had come just seconds before, from a computer in Northern California.
Trojan’s virus had infected its host only minutes earlier, but already the powerful computer, belonging to a middle-aged Silicon Valley video-game enthusiast, had broken into one of the world’s most secure computer systems.
Randomly, the California resident’s computer had successfully hacked into the New York Federal Reserve Bank, one of twelve member banks belonging to the Federal Reserve System.
It would be a devastating attack. Consumer banks immediately lent out nearly every dime they received in deposits, which left them with almost no cash on hand to cover withdrawals.
The twelve reserve banks in the Federal Reserve System lent cash to their regional “member banks”—the private banks that accepted consumer deposits and wrote loans to individuals for homes, cars, and other goods—in order to cover the day’s withdrawals.
If there wasn’t enough cash to cover the day’s withdrawals, the Fed simply lent more cash to cover the member bank’s shortfall. This made it appear to consumers as if their money was safely stored in their local bank, when in reality, almost none of their money remained in the bank’s system.
It was a clever trick, designed to prevent public panic and bank runs, and designed to allow the banks to write multiple loans against the same deposits.
It was also, Trojan felt, one of the major reasons that the US dollar was worth a small fraction of its value just a century ago, when the Fed was born.
Like Archive, Trojan believed that it was impossible to print currency on demand without devaluing it at the same time. Also like Archive, he viewed inflation, the predictable result of printing more currency at will, as a form of theft.
Trojan was happy to be doing something about it.
Once inside the computerized Federal Reserve Bank ledgers, Trojan’s virus simply overwrote all of the existing data with the number “1,” effectively deleting the giant bank’s entire account record.
Then it saved the new database, full of nothing but 1’s instead of the correct account values.
It saved a new copy of the useless database tens of thousands of times per hour. Each time the virus saved the meaningless database values, it displaced an archived version of the correct account information.
By morning, there would be no meaningful record of any of the banks’ accounts or transactions, and the automatic backup system would be full of hundreds of thousands of saved copies of the corrupted database, all containing nothing but 1’s.
The virus also changed every bank employee’s password to a unique 1,000-character string of random letters. Each password would take a full day to break, even using an advanced code-breaking algorithm such as the one that Trojan’s virus used to break into the Fed’s system.
Trojan had another nasty surprise in store. Even if Fed employees could somehow log in, they would be unable to make changes to the database, since all system resources were tied up saving the bogus information over and over again.
Of course, viruses could be disabled and quarantined. But by the time the Fed’s computer experts found and stopped Trojan’s creation, it would be far too late to save the system. It would take forensic computer scientists eons to reconstruct each regional Fed branch’s accounts as they stood before the attack.
It was the computer equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
As soon as private banks lent or paid out all of their on-hand cash, which would happen within a matter of hours after opening for business the next morning, banking in America would cease. The Fed’s stricken reserve branches would have no ability to lend cash that its databases said didn’t exist.
It wouldn’t take long for the panic to spread to banking systems and stock markets around the world.
Trojan took a deep breath.
He was afflicted by a nagging apprehension. He hoped Archive’s plan to keep the banking collapse from inciting worldwide riots worked as advertised. Trojan was eager to right a few trillion wrongs, but he had no desire to have blood on his hands.
Another alert popped up on his computer screen. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis had just been breached.
96
Washington, DC. Monday, 8:58 p.m. ET.
“They swallowed it hook, line and sinker,” Dan told Sam. “The HRT chopper is miles away from Brock, and our hunch was right. The cell phone traffic confirms that DHS is definitely compromised.”
“They chatted like high school girls,” Sam said. “I can’t believe how fast you found them.”
“All in a minute’s work,” he said with a self-satisfied chuckle. “Listen, it’s time for us to play the phone game with the bastards. You need to send the text we talked about, then turn your Blackberry off and remove the SIM card from the back. You and I will communicate by your personal cell phone. They’ll figure it out eventually, but this should buy us the time we need.”
“Got it. Here goes.”
Sam slowed her Porsche and stopped weaving in and out of traffic. She didn’t want to wrap herself around a telephone pole while she typed on her government-issued Blackberry.
She whispered a prayer, pressed “Send,” then disassembled her phone.
Within a minute, she was flying down the highway again, using the shoulder to dodge traffic.
97
Somewhere on the East Coast. Monday, 9:06 p.m. ET.
Hawk Nose wasn’t surprised by the message from the red-headed DHS agent. If anything, he was surprised that it hadn’t come sooner.
He had anticipated a demand for proof that his hostage—the woman’s live-in lover, apparently—was still alive.
He was prepared. He looked at the image of the writhing Air Force officer he had taken minutes before. The man’s face was contorted in obvious pain after a swift kick to his festering gunshot wound, but Hawk Nose was more concerned that the date on the sports section of the newspaper, placed on the filthy mattress next to the hostage, was legible in the photo.
Satisfied, he sent the image.
Then he opened his laptop computer, and navigated to a particular web-based service. It was an expensive service, but worth every penny. It was highly illegal, of course, which was why the site was hosted on the online Tor anonymity-protection network.
Hawk Nose typed in his login information, then typed Sam Jameson’s cell phone number into the site’s search window.
Within seconds, a Google Earth map appeared, along with a pulsating red dot, which followed the highway between DC and Severna Park.
The girl was thirty minutes away, driving toward her date with destiny.
Where is the goddamned assassin? Hawk Nose didn’t relish serious violence, and he didn’t want to do the dirty work himself. He hoped his large counterpart would return before the girl arrived.
98
Somewhere on the East Coast. Monday, 9:12 p.m. ET.
Sam’s personal cell phone buzzed. She fumbled with it for a second before finding the “hands free” option. “What’s up, Dan?”
“Good news and bad news.”
“Hit me,” Sam said, crossing both lanes of traffic and nearly clipping a Toyota before passing by on the shoulder.
“The cell phone trick is working. Whatever you do, don’t put the battery back in your work phone.”
“That sounds like the good news,” Sam said.
“It was. The other part isn’t as cheery,” Dan said. “I intercepted another text sent to your work cell.”
Sam felt her stomach tighten, and a feeling of dread closed around her.
Dan took a breath before continuing, “They sent another picture of Brock, again with today’s newspaper next to him. He’s alive, but. . .”
Sam felt a rush of fear and anger. She clenched her jaw, tightened her grip on the steering wheel, and pushed the accelerator even further toward the floorboard.
“I’m sorry, Sam. Don’t lose heart, and for the love of God, please stick to the plan. We’re going to get these assholes.”
The large assassin walked into the warehouse. The place smelled like axle grease and gasoline. It had been home for the better part of three days. He was ready to move on.
“It’s about time you showed up,” Hawk Nose said.
“I don’t recall having asked for an editorial,” the feral-eyed hit man retorted.
“The girl is thirty minutes away. Time to finish the job. You haven’t had the most successful week in history, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fuck this up, please.”
“Touché. How about the bait?”
“He stays alive for now.”
The assassin grunted in acknowledgement. He removed the partially empty clip from his pistol and replaced it with a full one, then tucked the pistol into his belt. He placed two more full clips of ammunition into the cargo pocket on his left pant leg.
Then he grabbed a large duffel bag, unzipped the zipper, and surveyed the contents. It contained a working radio and all of the parts required to assemble a silenced Panther Arms semiautomatic assault rifle. The large man left the warehouse without another word.
Five minutes later, the radio on the table next to Hawk Nose’s chair crackled to life. The assassin’s report was brief: “Ready.”
Hawk Nose guessed that his partner was positioned atop the low utility shed rooftop adjacent to the abandoned warehouse. The position afforded a clear field of fire covering the entire half-block approach to the warehouse entrance, but was low enough to allow the assassin to jump to the ground quickly if needed.
Hawk Nose refreshed the cell phone location service’s web page on his laptop computer, double-checking that Sam Jameson’s cell phone number remained in the “target” window.
The map refreshed, and the pulsing dot reappeared. “Twelve miles. She’s twenty minutes away with traffic,” he transmitted.
“Copy,” the assassin replied.
99
New York City. Monday, 9:18 p.m. ET.
An oversized pickup truck pulled into the narrow parking space in the undersized lot at Nassau and Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. The driver ensured the truck had a clear view of the entire building located at 11 Wall Street, then turned off the ignition. The New York Stock Exchange building looked stately and intimidating, even in the darkness.
Three men exited the truck. One man started the large diesel generator sitting in the bed directly behind the truck’s cab. A second man flipped switches on a strange device with six parabolic dishes mounted on a gimbal assembly. The third fired up the laptop computer strapped on top of the device’s metal case.
The truck-mounted device was a smaller, less powerful version of the Senior Quantum weapon that Art Levitow was busy assembling in a disused wind tunnel at Langley Air Force Base.
“Self-checks are all good,” said a small red-haired man with a scraggly mustache.
“Controller’s up and running. Calculating the firing pattern now,” said a man in a Yarmulke. He watched the readout mounted on the side of the device, which was taking laser measurements of the building’s dimensions and feeding them into the computer.
“Firing pattern locked, and we’re a go,” Yarmulke announced two minutes later. “Ten seconds.” He and his two compatriots returned to the truck’s cab.
The generator’s sound changed noticeably as the device’s electrical demand abruptly peaked. “Holy shit, that thing pulls some juice,” scraggly mustache said.
The men turned to watch the gimbal-mounted device with the six dish antennae. It moved slowly back and forth. At each position, the device slowly moved the focal point of the Senior Quantum beams forward and back through the entire depth of the building. The point was to ensure every electronic device in the building met its end.
The few lights visible inside the building began to go out, small sparks announcing their demise
. It took a little longer than twenty minutes for the beam to sweep its way through the entire NYSE building.
The night watchman’s desk light and computer were among the last electrical devices to die, which they did with a small fizzle and an imperceptible puff of smoke. “ConEd, you suck,” the watchman said. He thought it was a power outage.
When the truck pulled out of the parking lot, the New York Stock Exchange was completely dark. No electrical devices survived the attack.
The team’s next stop would take significantly longer. It was the thirty-two-story high-rise building located at 375 Pearl Street, also in Manhattan. The building housed thousands of computers, which formed the Manhattan node of what people commonly referred to as the Internet.
This particular node, located in the foreclosed Verizon building, was positioned as closely as possible to the financial district in order to shave tiny thousandths of seconds off the data transfer time. A small advantage in data transfer time allowed the big banks to squeeze billions of dollars of extra cash out of the sucker bets placed by millions of unsophisticated investors.
Roughly mid-way through the Senior Quantum device’s measurement process outside the Internet facility, a New York police officer stopped to ask Yarmulke about the strange-looking box and the noisy generator.
“It’s a new anti-terrorism thing,” he replied to the cop’s question, wielding a fake but official-looking permit. “They say it’s supposed to detect electronic terror threats. I say it’s just making noise.” The cop laughed and left.
“The computer says two hours,” Yarmulke announced to the team after the firing pattern computation completed several minutes later.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 140
