“The hell you are,” Jimmy Foley told his wife. “I don’t want them to know who you are, that you even exist.”
“My existence is not really a state secret, Jimmy. This is not negotiable. Dr. Rathstein said you shouldn’t even leave the apartment this weekend. Remember, hotshot, you were in a hospital in California when you woke up yesterday. I don’t want you passing out by yourself in the middle of some Russian mafia lair in Little Odessa,” she said, grabbing and squeezing his hand.
“I knew I shoulda taken a cab,” he said, and then laughed and leaned over and kissed her. Despite the residual anesthetics in his system, he had had no difficulty doing that and a lot more during the night before. “All right. Take your ring off. Your name is Susan Connor and you are my partner at the Intelligence Analysis Center and you will let me do all the talking.”
“I thought you said Susan was African-American?” Jessica asked.
“It will confuse them, if they even know that much,” Jimmy said, getting out of the car. He had woken up early and waited until 0730 before calling his old NYPD partner. Detective Vin DeCarlo was up, making pancakes for his three kids and letting his wife sleep in, as he did every Saturday. Unfortunately, he was also going to take the kids to the Rangers game and could not join Jimmy on his outing to Brighton Beach. His information about what was going on in the Ismailovskaya, the Russian mob, was priceless. He had stayed on the Russian crime beat when Jimmy had left for his year in Washington.
With the bandages over his left eye, Detective Jimmy Foley knew he did not look as formidable as he wanted to. He had, however, worn his best suit. He just hoped that Jessica did not look too much like his wife. They crossed the busy street, dodging cars, to the Pushkin restaurant, where Gregori Belov had agreed to meet for an early lunch. The Russian sat alone on the banquette in the semicircular corner booth, among the overstuffed pillows. He had a thick head of silver-white hair, broad shoulders, and a florid face. He wore a black suit and white shirt with no tie. Jessica guessed he was in his early fifties. “For a mobster’s lair, it has a lot of lace and tassels, and red,” Jessica said sotto voce as they moved through the nearly empty room.
“Dobriy den! James, James, back from Washington so soon, and with a new partner? Much nicer,” Belov bellowed as they approached his throne. “Rada tebya videt. They don’t have good Palmeni or Sacivi in Washington?” He took Jessica’s hand and kissed it delicately. “Gregori Belov. Ochinprivatna.”
“Delighted,” Jessica said, blushing. “Susan Connor, Foley’s partner.” It was only half a lie, she thought.
“Foley and Connor—sounds like the NYPD union,” Belov said as they both settled in on his left.
“Mr. Belov, thank you for meeting on such short notice. Spasiba,” Jimmy started.
“Mr. Belov. Mr.?” the Russian said, opening the bottle of vodka on the table. “Pyatizvyozdnaya, my favorite—it means ‘with five stars.’ The honey in it is good for my throat. Pazhaltsa!” He poured them each a four-finger shot.
“Choot-choot,” Jimmy said, trying in vain to get less in his glass.
“Na zdarOv’ye,” Belov toasted, and then, looking at Jessica, “Za vas.”
“It means ‘to you,’” Jimmy explained.
“You do not speak Russian, lovely lady? Oh, please forgive my rudeness,” Belov said, bowing his head. “English only from now on.” He downed the vodka. Jessica sipped some, but Jimmy emptied his painted shot glass. “Miss Connor, do you know that Jimmy learned his Russian in the Marines? He was supposed to learn Arabic, but the class was full and they had all of these Russian instructors left over. Monterey, yes, James?”
“Monterey, yes, Gregori. Defense Language Institute. Again, thank you for the meeting,” Jimmy tried again.
“Vinny DeCarlo calls me at eight-thirty in the morning and says you must see me or the world will end. Of course, I see you. The understanding that you helped to broker here in Brooklyn is holding. Street crime is down. The Bratva, if there were a Bratva, is not selling drugs here and has provided useful leads on others who do, the Mexicans, Colombians.” A waiter had been standing quietly, holding menus and a wine list. “Jimmy, if I recall, wants the borscht and then the Palmeni. So do I,” Belov told the waiter. “And caviar, of course.”
“Well, then, make it three,” Jessica added quickly.
“And the mukuzani,” he said, rejecting the wine list and turning again to Jessica. “Georgian wine, but dry, velvety, almost smoky.” He looked back at Jimmy and his bandages. “So I know you want to get right down to business, but I have been good and have not asked—so first, who poked you in the eye?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out, Gregori.”
“Ah, so this is personal. Well, then, I will be even more helpful.” Belov smiled at Jessica, then at Jimmy. “How can I help? Who can I kill? Just kidding, of course.”
“The word is that with Dimitri Yellin missing, you have, shall we say, adopted the Ukrainian chapter?” Jimmy asked.
“They came to me. They knew I am not responsible for Dimitri’s disappearance. My daughter married his son, Sergei. We do not compete. We had different sales districts, different product lines. We watch each other’s backs. Sergei asked me for help keeping his group from splitting up. The Georgian, Karinshasvili, tried to recruit some of them.” Belov spoke quickly, in bursts, like a Kalashnikov on full automatic.
“I know it wasn’t you, Gregori, but what did happen to Dimitri?” Jimmy asked.
“I have tried to find out from Sergei, of course,” Belov said, spreading the caviar on a pancake. “Dimitri had a contract with someone, a shishka. He never knew who it was, but the man paid handsomely and in gold and cash. To do the job, Dimitri had to buy things and get some people from back home. Sergei says the money left over has disappeared. The gold transferred out of their account. The vehicle carrying the cash vanished.” Belov consumed the pancake in one piece and washed it down with a vodka. “Jimmy, you said this is personal. Whatever Dimitri did for this man…Sergei is now my son, under my protection. Tell me you are not here investigating Sergei or his men.”
Jimmy Foley reached his hand across the table to Gregori Belov. “I am not here investigating Sergei or his men.” The two men shook on it. “I want the man who contracted with Dimitri Yellin, and I need him very soon, this weekend.”
The borscht arrived. “I understand what you want now, Jimmy, and how much you want it, but this weekend?”
“It is not only personal, Gregori,” Jimmy added. “A great deal depends upon it.”
Families had been drifting in, filling up the Pushkin, but none had interrupted Belov’s lunch to wish him well or pay tribute. They respected his space. Looking around at the Saturday luncheon crowd, Jessica wondered where Belov’s security was. She had lost the thread of the conversation and knew that Jimmy would never explain it to her afterward. At times it almost sounded like one of her midtown lunches trying to convince a client to do an initial public offering.
As the main course was being cleared, Belov dabbed his lips almost daintily with the linen napkin. “For me to find out what you want, I may need to spend some money, and I will certainly be running some risk,” he suggested.
“The government will be very appreciative,” Jimmy replied.
“The government? The federal government?” Belov asked. “At a high level?”
“At a very high level,” Jimmy said confidently.
“Jimmy, there is a company upstate that has been trying to sell things, food and the like, to Fort Drum, the mountain troops there. They need a long-term contract with decent margins so they can give our troops the very best.”
“I’m sure the Pentagon can be persuaded to want the very best for Fort Drum, Gregori.”
Belov signaled that he was going to push back the table. The meal was over. Four men came out from behind the red curtains, two on either side of the table. They were not waiters. Standing, Belov again kissed Jessica’s hand. “You are lucky to be with Jimmy—
he will make a good father.” He then turned to the bandaged detective. “Also, Jimmy, I have a nephew in Massachusetts. He wants to resettle in Nevada. Not Novosibirsk. Da?”
Jimmy looked at the Russian mobster. “I need the information fast, Gregori. Very fast.” The men shook hands, and as the Foleys left the restaurant, their host began circulating among the tables, like the mayor of Little Odessa.
0855 PST
Las Vegas, Nevada
“I wish we hadn’t abandoned the ranch so quickly,” Packetman complained.
“We had a compromise of site security. We had no choice,” the General spit out. “Let’s get on with it. You have everything here that you had there. Explain to me how it will work. How do we unplug the electrical system?”
Above them in the darkened room were three seventy-two-inch screens, one showing a map of the western United States and Canada, the other two with a maze of lines and color-coded boxes. “So, there are three electric power zones in the country—East, West, and Texas,” Packetman explained.
“I always knew Texas was different,” the General said, staring at the diagrams.
“The Western Interconnect includes everything west of the Mississippi in Canada and the U.S., plus Baja in Mexico. It’s divided into five subzones. We are going to attack each of the five differently. Watch.” Packetman threw a Keynote briefing slide up on the middle screen. “In CBRC, California basically, we are going to cause the voltage levels to drop on the north-south bulk electrical system by giving instructions to their SCADA control system, but we will play ‘man in the middle’ and catch the signals that are sent back up to the reliability coordinator command center in Riverside. The signals we send to the center will make it look like everything is fine. Then, when the voltage gets low enough, bang, a cascading failure of the grid.”
“How did you get into the control system, if that is not a trade secret?” the General asked.
“It is, but you pay me well. Hacked the firewall between their consumer billing system and the transmission reporting. Took a while, but I’ve been inside for over a year, programmed their intrusion-detection system not to notice me,” Packetman said, and beamed.
“So California goes out. That trips everything else?” the General queried.
“Might, but just to be sure, I got into the RMRC area—that’s around here, Nevada—by putting a radio out in the desert. The power company broadcasts control instructions to some of their unmanned sites in the clear on radio frequencies, not by landline. Easy to get in by overpowering the real radio signal. And once you’re in the network, you can go anywhere. No encryption, no access authorization, no internal firewalls. They have all their generators’ turbines spinning synchronized at exactly the same speed all over the country, sixty cycles. If I change that by twenty percent, it knocks up the power fourfold. We applied a binary patch to the firmware of all the generators to override the governors that limit their speed.”
“I don’t understand a word you just said,” the General complained, towering above the seated hacker.
“We’re going to send so much power down the lines from the plants that it will fry the big transformers just outside the plants and the high-tension wires will get so hot they will droop and then melt. With one five hundred thousand–volt line disabled, two other five hundred thousand–volt lines will become overloaded and shut down. This, in turn, causes the main power artery between geographic regions to shut down. Safety systems will automatically shed load in an attempt to keep the system in balance. However, the increased demand on the generators at other electric utilities causes a ripple effect.
“Every generator on the entire grid has to be spinning at exactly the same rate, sixty hertz, before it can be connected to the grid. They have software that minimizes frequency error, and software turbine governors that prevent the spin rate from going too high. We hacked that software so some of the generators will spin so fast that they will jump right off their moorings and go crashing around the floor, damaging all their turbine blades. It will take months to repair some of them. And Siemens and GE don’t have huge warehouses of extras sitting around. It’s all Build When Bought.”
The General smiled. “That I understand. All of these little programs will start at the same moment?”
“All the executables are keyed to the power grid’s atomic clock time. It all happens at nine o’clock, in ninety seconds.” Packetman hit a stroke on his keyboard. “And we can watch it all live on their reporting system. The Saturday shift guys, they’ll freak. Let’s hope our emergency generators here work so we can watch.”
“We could have made it much worse,” the General observed. “Could have been a Monday-night rush hour in July. Could have been the entire country.”
“Yeah,” Packetman smirked, “but they’re not gonna get it back for a while. The nuclear plants especially take a long time to come back up. The blackout will go on for days, into the workweek. And if we want, it could be weeks.”
0859 PST
Electrical Reliability Coordination Center
Riverside, California
“It’s so hot for March that they’ll be turning on the air-conditioning in L.A., Phoenix, and Vegas before noon. You watch,” Danny Hubbard told his supervisor, Fran Cella, as the two sat below a fifty-foot-long wall of large computer screens. In front of them were smaller screens and a bank of switches and lights. The indicators were all in the green. The voltage level on the transmission lines showed well above the critical minimums. The indicators had been reprogrammed by Packetman never to dip, never to alarm, no matter what the incoming data actually was. The same code change had been made systemwide by one cyberbot inserted into the control network.
“Yeah, but at least it’s Saturday, so the load is light,” she said, carefully dipping her Chinese herbal chai in the dragon-covered pot of piping-hot water.
Then, at substations and transformers throughout the California and Baja electric grid, an instruction message was received in the computer code language of the supervisory control and data acquisition system: drop voltage. Each programmable box obeyed. Monitoring systems scattered throughout the state instantly noticed the entire grid’s voltage drop below safe minimums. The monitoring systems sent alarm messages to control centers: “High loading, low voltage without electrical faults on unprotected lines.” Slightly over a minute later, three different sensors in the field sent in priority messages: “Potential for cascading failures.” Packetman’s handiwork sent the messages into cyber black holes. No needles moved. No lights flashed. No Klaxons sounded.
“How much are we buying today from Pacific Northwest?” Fran asked, blowing on the cup to cool the black tea. As she spoke, the large screens abruptly went dark and the room plunged into blackness. Fran Cella leaped out of her chair, reaching for a telephone. “Son of a bitch!” she screamed as the scalding water spilled down her chest. Slowly, a few dim yellow lights came on from battery pack emergency boxes mounted on the walls. “We lost power? We did? We’re supposed to be running the grid, for Christ sakes! Danny, how’s the grid?”
The big boards had failed to come back on. Danny Hubbard was glaring at a small monitor in front of his position and rebooting his desktop computer. “I thought the center had its own backup emergency generator?” he asked as his system spun up. “We’re only on batteries.”
“We do have a generator. Supposed to test it again next month,” Fran said, hanging up the telephone. “Lines are dead. What’s your screen say?”
“It says, ‘System was improperly shut down. Data loss may have occurred.’ No fucking shit!”
At the nuclear power plants in the desert, generators went into automatic shutdown mode because of the absence of external electrical power to support their emergency systems. Regional air traffic control at Los Angeles Center, running on its emergency generator, queried aircraft whether they had enough fuel to return to Honolulu or make it to Dallas. At LAX, the tower slowed landings and began stacking aircraft in the
skies over the Pacific. Under the streets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, subway trains stopped dead in darkened tunnels.
Elevators in high-rise apartment buildings and office towers froze between floors. In casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Laughlin, and Tahoe, gamblers fought over chips in dimly lit halls. At the ports in Long Beach and Oakland, giant cranes halted with shipping containers hanging in midair. At hospitals in twenty states, staff struggled with emergency generators, as nurses began shutting off patient monitors to shed load on the backup power and started trying to pry open windows for ventilation. Police moved patrol cars with lights flashing into intersections to direct traffic on surface streets, as the traffic control lights sat unresponsive.
At gas stations throughout the region, pumps stopped working. Quarter-mile-long trains with food, cars, and coal halted on tracks throughout the West as the railroad’s control system went dark. At the prisons in Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin, inmates clashed with guards attempting to put the institutions in lockdown. Pharmacies in Phoenix, Denver, and South Central Los Angeles were looted. At windowless high-rises filled with telephone switches and internet routers, batteries failed and switches crashed due to inadequate loads from backup power systems. Burglar alarms went off across the region.
Military bases in California and Colorado went on alert and rolled armored vehicles to the gates. The watch commander at LAPD headquarters ordered all off-duty officers to report in and issued the coded radio message that meant “don riot gear.”
On the beaches of Venice and Malibu, no one noticed. The volleyball continued uninterrupted.
1200 EST
Basement Conference Room 3
The West Wing, the White House
“Rusty MacIntyre will be sitting in for Sol today,” National Security Advisor Wallace Reynolds announced to the Secretaries of Defense and State. “You all know Russell, of course.” Reynolds was in jeans and a Princeton sweatshirt.
“Why does he gets Saturdays off?” Secretary of State Brenda Neyers asked, only half kiddingly. “He’s not Orthodox.”
Breakpoint Page 18
