Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

  “Good question,” Susan agreed. “Why do we leave important places unguarded?”

  “That’s something we need to rethink,” said Rusty. “Meanwhile our operating assumption is that this whole thing is China achieving escalation dominance.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but what’s that?” Jimmy asked.

  “It means they not only hurt us, they demonstrate that they can hurt us a lot more, they can escalate in ways that we don’t expect. That way, we’re deterred from doing anything against them,” Susan explained.

  “Right. In this case, deterred from helping Taiwan, if China’s next move is to attack Taiwan and stop them from declaring independence. But this President is not going to be deterred.” Rusty looked from Susan to Jimmy, making sure they understood his implication. “FBI and Homeland have the lead, they’ll crash away investigating. But there are two large tasks that we don’t trust them to get right. That’s where you in Special Projects come in. There were not a bunch of Chinese agents running around the country preparing these bombings, we’d have known about it. They hired somebody. Your first task is find out who.

  “Second, somebody figured out an Achilles’ heel in our technology and national infrastructure, one we obviously hadn’t recognized ourselves. They will probably do it again. Before they do, you must find out what their next target is likely to be. FBI and Homeland will probably focus on refineries and bridges and things like that. But this was an attack on our technology—that’s where we’ve got to look.”

  Susan nodded and smiled. She knew he was right; they had to avoid groupthink again. It had been way too costly before. And they had to focus on protecting what mattered now, in an information age, not back in the twentieth century.

  “Sounds good to me,” Foley said. He turned to Susan. “See you in the office in about an hour, boss.” He grinned and moved off with his Harley.

  Rusty read Susan’s irritation. “Foley is not what he seems, Susan. Forget that surface attitude. The Commissioner told me he’s the best detective they’ve had in years. He only loaned him to me to give Foley some Washington experience. The skills you have will complement each other well.” He could see that she wasn’t convinced. “Just crack this case for me, Susan. Crack it fast. The Bureau, Homeland, they’re looking for the keys where the streetlights shine. You go into the shadows.”

  2100 EST

  Special Projects Office, Intelligence Analysis Center

  Navy Hill, Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.

  They had been reading reports for five hours when Jimmy Foley suggested he make them some snacks. From the little office kitchenette, he called out to Susan, “You know what I still don’t get? I thought Taiwan was independent?”

  Susan Connor looked up from an ATF report on her flat screen. “Yeah, well, it is, for all practical purposes. Has been for almost seventy years, since the Nationalist Party fled there from the mainland when the Communists took over. But they maintain the fiction that they are still a province of China. And so does China. Beijing wants them back someday, like Hong Kong. Whenever Taiwan says they’re going to formally declare that they are no longer part of China, Beijing goes nuts.”

  Foley did not reply, but there was a continued clanging of pots and pans from the kitchenette. Susan went back to her report and yelled in the direction of her new staffer, “Man, there is one shitload of explosives stolen in this country every year. You know that, Jimmy?”

  “Uh-huh,” Foley responded from the break room. “Most of it gets sold back to construction firms on the black market. Come get your dinner.”

  “My what?” Susan laughed and got up to see what the NYPD detective had been up to. “Jesus, Jimmy, you trying out for Iron Chef?” she gasped as she surveyed the spread on the little table. “Pasta à la pesto. Where’s some Mick learn Italiano?”

  “You mean some Mick cop, don’t you?” Jimmy smiled and pulled back a chair for his new boss. “Five boys in my family. I’m number two, and for some reason Dad tagged me as the cook.”

  “And Mom?”

  “Died when I was ten. Dad worked ’til dinner every night. Lawyer. So I got the dinner ready. After a while, even a bunch a guys get sick of pizza or beans and franks. So…”

  “Hmmm…nice pesto. Lots of garlic.” Susan spoke while eating. “I hereby forgive you for not working harder researching the case.”

  “Who says I haven’t been researching the case, boss?” Jimmy said, putting down his knife and fork. “You want to know what I’ve found out so far? The Fibbies are all over the trucks, VIN numbers, tracks, witnesses, explosive residue. They have twelve hundred agents on it already in a little over twelve hours. They’ve given it a major-case name—Cybomb; catchy, right?—and put an assistant director in charge. And so far they got dead ends, bupkis. For their part, NSA is going back over all the calls originating near the beachheads around the time of the explosions. Nada there, too.”

  Susan was impressed, but assumed that Jimmy had a source in the FBI who had simply read him a summary written for the assistant director. That did not count as research, as far as she was concerned. She had been spending the hours since they’d received the new assignment trying to understand the importance of what had been destroyed. “Okay, good, but we have to get to the why before we can find the who. Why does somebody want to reduce communications to Europe and Asia? The internet is still working here. It’s slow from all the messages wandering around cyberspace that can’t be delivered, but it’s working. So who and why? An attack like this must hurt China, too. We’ve got to figure out why they’d do it.”

  Foley shook his head, rejecting the question. “Look, I figured that’s what the FBI and NSA were doing, going after China. Like Rusty said, the Chinese army isn’t running around Jersey. Maybe they hired someone. Maybe misled them, a false-flag operation. So I’d look for that. Also think about the Unabomber in a way. Kaczynski was a whacked-out professor who wanted to stop technological advance. So what does he do? He starts sending bombs to other professors at universities around the country…professors pushing technological advance.” He shrugged. “Something to think about. Also the fact that the Fibbies never caught him until his own brother dropped a dime on him.” He went back to his pasta.

  “Okay, so…little mail bombs fifteen years ago on college campuses and ten really big truck bombs today at internet nodes—one guy then, dozens now.” Susan cocked her head and squinted. “And the connection is…what?”

  “Come on, boss. What’s cyberspace? Technology. The Chinese are after our technology. Stealing it first. Now for some reason blowing it up. Here, don’t forget your salad. Good balsamic,” he said, passing a little bottle across the table. “I did a search on incidents at technology-related facilities over the last twenty-four months. There’s been an interesting pattern over the last six months. A cyberspace company or biomed lab has gone up in a fire or explosion of some sort almost every month for the last six. That big fire at the data centers on the Columbia River last month? The Bio Fab in San Diego? A place at MIT just last Friday.”

  She stared at him, locked eyes. The dumb-cop routine was an act and she had fallen for it like some stereotypical Washington bureaucrat. Foley gave her a cherubic little smile that revealed two dimples. Then he winked. She tried hard not to be charmed like everybody else in the office. She was the supervisor, damn it.

  “Okay, Detective. What have we got on those incidents? Has the Bureau opened a major case on them, too?” Susan realized her voice was too flat, too professional. She should be friendlier. Even if he had caught her up with his big-jock act, he had also cooked her a not bad dinner, and using the office kitchen.

  “Nope. Six minor cases, and mainly it’s the local PDs and fire marshals investigating. The FBI hadn’t seen the pattern; still hasn’t.” He shook Parmesan flakes over the pasta on his plate.

  Susan digested the new information, and the pasta. “If those other attacks are related and we can find out who did them…we might be able to answer both
of Rusty’s questions: who the Chinese have doing their dirty work and what kind of things they are likely to attack next.”

  Jimmy nodded vigorously while he chewed. “Got a statie up in Boston I know who’s workin’ the MIT explosion, says he’ll walk us through it if we come up.”

  Susan smiled and shook her head admiringly. “So let’s go.”

  “We’re on the seven-thirty JetBlue shuttle in the morning, boss.”

  Although she was beginning to wonder exactly which of them was in charge, all she could say was “How do you happen to know the State Police detective on that case in Massachusetts?”

  “Cousin. All us Mick cops are related.”

  Laughing, Susan almost choked on her last bite. “All right, if I have to be up at five-thirty, I’m going home.” She picked up the empty plates and put them in the sink. Then, gathering up her coat and bag, she walked to the door. “See you at the shuttle. Nice work today, and on the food. But unless you want me to call you Jimmy Olsen instead of Jimmy Foley…I’m Susan. Don’t call me boss.”

  As the door shut behind her and she walked to the elevator, Susan Connor could swear she heard Foley say, “Right, Chief.” Walking to her car, she conceded to herself that it might be valuable to have a cop assisting her, since this project was clearly going to require fieldwork and in the U.S. Even if Foley didn’t seem to be appropriately deferential. That was not a new problem. Susan looked so much younger than she was and Rusty had promoted her rapidly despite her lack of experience in government. Of course, she thought as she drove by the security guard house, some of it might be due to her own attitude. She’d always resented men who seemed to make things look easier than they were, who got ahead on a winning smile and a pleasing patter. Maybe she should give Foley a chance. He did cook well.

  2245 Mountain Standard Time

  22,300 Miles Above the Pacific Ocean

  The twelve-thousand-pound New Galaxy satellite sat still relative to the Earth below. Its antennae were simultaneously sending and receiving gigabits of digital packets via radio and laser channels. When reassembled on the planet below, the packets would turn into e-mails, data streams, voice conversations, and television programs. Few of the packets were processed onboard, only those routed to the satellite’s housekeeping computer. With that minor exception, the packets merely passed through New Galaxy, quickly, quietly, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, from San Francisco to Sydney. In the frozen near-vacuum of space, as billions of data packets soared through its large antennae, New Galaxy made no sound that could be heard. Even when its ion xeon gas thrusters fired bursts for a microsecond to keep the station in the geostationary orbit, there was only silence.

  At 2248 mountain time, the satellite received an update message, a series of packets on the antenna and frequency used only by PacWestel, New Galaxy’s owner. From the header information on the packets, they were routed to the satellite’s onboard housekeeping computer, decrypted, and reassembled into a message. The message was longer than any of the satellite’s normal instructions. It filled the format line in the station-keeping program and then dropped an executable code into the computer. The code was in the same format as the many maintenance messages that adjusted the antennae or ran diagnostics on an onboard system, but it wrote over the existing program, eliminating certain limitations. The code adjusted the ion xeon thrusters to the six o’clock position and performed a xeon gas release. The thrust time in the code was not the usual three seconds. It was 300.00 seconds.

  Quietly, New Galaxy moved farther away from Earth, its speed accelerating as it did. Then the last instruction on the update message was executed: New Galaxy went into energy-conservation mode, shutting down all systems for 999 days. When the systems rebooted, New Galaxy’s antennae would not be facing toward Earth. The satellite would be well on its way to escaping the solar system.

  2310 MST

  Space Tracking and Detection Center, U.S. Space Command

  Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

  “…so I had to leave home with the Avalanche down by one,” Captain Fred Yang complained to Master Chief Sergeant Brad Anderson.

  “That’s what TiVo is for, Captain. By the way, you missed the shift-change briefing.” Anderson was fifteen years older than the captain, who was technically in charge of the center for the next eight hours.

  “I know, I know. I’ll read in by running the change software. Nothing ever happens here anyway. I don’t know why we have to be inside a mountain. It’s so twentieth century, so Cold War…” Captain Yang mumbled as he sat down at his console and started keying in. For several minutes, Yang stared quietly at the screen, and then he said, with a note of concern, “Sarge? The change-detection program says we have three fewer birds aloft. And the ones that are missing don’t make any sense.”

  Sergeant Anderson had just picked up the ringing green phone, the drop line to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. He placed a hand over the mouthpiece before answering it. “Captain, we get debris all the time, old birds flaming out in the upper atmosphere. It’s no biggie.” He turned to the phone while Yang pounded away on a touch screen. “Yes, sir, this is Spacetrac. No, we haven’t seen anything unusual over the Pacific. Why?” Anderson wrote down what they told him. “Okay, we’ll keep an eye open. Right.” He hung the phone on a hook next to four other color-coded drop lines, then spun his chair toward the young captain.

  Yang stood up from his console. “Sarge, New Galaxy 3, Netstar 5, and Pacific Wave 7 are not old birds with decaying orbits.”

  “No kidding. NG-3 just went up last month, right after Sinosat-12.” The sargeant got up and walked toward Yang’s screen. “What are you talking about…sir?”

  “They’re gone. Not deorbited. Goneski.” Yang pointed at the screen.

  “What the…,” Sergeant Anderson said, sitting down at the captain’s position.

  As Anderson began typing in commands, the white phone rang. Yang answered as the sergeant worked the screen. “Spacetrac…yeah. We just noticed that, too…. Well, I thought there might be a problem with that bird…that one, too…. We’re checking. Sure. Get right back to you.”

  Anderson looked up at the captain questioningly. “It was DISA in Virginia,” Yang reported. “They said they lost connectivity with some commercial comm sats in the Pacific. I thought the Pentagon had its own satellites.”

  Anderson reached for a headset. The Defense Information Systems Agency was the phone company for the entire Defense Department, globally. “Yeah, they rent space on private satellites, a lot of it. They can’t fight a war without them.” As he spoke, he flipped through the Space Command directory, then hit the touch pad to connect. “Maui, this is Spacetrac, Colorado Springs. We need a visual on three geosyncs immediately…. We have the Commander’s override priority and we need to look at these birds now!”

  At the summit of Mount Haleakala, nine thousand feet above the waters of the Pacific, Space Command’s Maui Space Surveillance Site turned its optical telescopes and laser-tracking devices to three parking orbits twenty-two thousand miles overhead. Fifteen minutes later, the results of their search were clear. “Spacetrac, Maui here. There are no satellites in those locations, turned on or stealthy. Nothing but cold, black emptiness,” the civilian contractor from Raytheon reported back to Cheyenne Mountain. “We can broaden the search, use the Deep Space trackers if you got the juice to pull them off their current missions.”

  “Thanks. We may have to do that. Get back to you,” Sergeant Anderson, said and took off the earpiece. “Captain Yang, I think you’d better do this yourself.” Anderson got out of Yang’s chair.

  “Do what, Sarge?”

  “There is a preformatted message in the system you need to send to the Commander and to the Pentagon, Flash precedence. The subject line is ‘Major Incident in Space.’”

  2 Monday, March 9

  0745 EST

  Logan International Airport, Boston

  “No, don’t go that way. It’s rush h
our. Take the Ted and we’ll loop back through the B School,” Susan directed as Jimmy Foley drove the rent-a-car out of the Hertz lot.

  “Oh, yeah, forgot. You know your way around here. Went to college here. And graduate school, right?”

  “You did your homework,” Susan replied as the car entered the tunnel. “Yeah, I lived in the freezer that was then Boston for seven icy years after growing up in Atlanta. Summer lasted a week up here. It’s better now with global warming kicking in…. Now the real test of your knowledge: Ted Williams, the guy this tunnel is named after, holds a record for a season batting average…”

  “Four-oh-six in 1941,” Jimmy snapped back before she could finish the question.

  “NYPD—shouldn’t you be a Yankee fan?”

  “I am. But Ted Williams was a Marine fighter pilot. World War Two and Korea.” He held up his hand to show off a ring. “Semper Fi.”

  Susan silently damned herself for not getting around to reading Foley’s personnel file. Rusty had simply assigned him to her, no questions allowed, but still she should have spent some time learning about the newest of her ten-person team. She wondered how much Foley had read about her.

  “It’s amazing to think what guys like Williams did without steroids,” Jimmy added. “Think what they could do now if the league wasn’t so backward in their thinking about PEPs.”

  “PEPs?”