“He’s out of town,” Reynolds said testily. “He cleared it with the President. I just wanted to get a briefing today on what we could do in cyberspace, so we understand things better when we get the briefing on all the various options Monday from the Pentagon. I don’t know about you, but I don’t get how all this stuff works. And I thought if China or someone is messing with our computer things, well, maybe we could do that kind of thing too. Tit for tat. What was it you said, Bill—bytes not bombs, or something?”
Secretary of Defense William Chesterfield nodded at a general, who pointed his finger at a colonel, who turned on the projector. A slide appeared on the wall with two words written in white on a black background: Information Warfare. The General, Major General Chuck Mann, United States Air Force, spoke: “We define Information Warfare to be those actions which we take to affect the information available to the enemy, to include leaflet drops, radio and television programming, e-mail messages, and other media. Whenever possible, our doctrine holds that the information used shall be truthful, although it can obviously be tailored to stress those things which we want the enemy to believe.
“In the 2003 liberation of Iraq, we successfully employed all of those media to send a message to Iraqi Army officers that they should not oppose us, that we were only after Saddam and his sons, they could stay in the Army, and that they should send their troops home for a while and should park their tanks and other vehicles in non-threatening formations. Many did what we asked and American lives were saved.”
Brenda Neyers coughed. “Only to be lost later because we double-crossed the Iraqi Army, fired the Iraqi Army’s officer corps, and failed to seize their weapons. We paid for that little lie for years, with the blood of our troops.”
“Brenda, please,” Wallace Reynolds chided. “There’s no need to get into all of that again. It was almost a decade ago that all of that started. Not on our watch. But, General, if I may, I thought we were going to talk about computers?”
The General looked at the Secretary of Defense, who nodded for him to answer. “Sir, I was asked to prepare a briefing on Information Warfare. Computers do play a role. We did send the Iraqi officers e-mails.”
Rusty MacIntyre saw the conversation was going nowhere fast. “Wallace, the military use the term ‘Information Warfare’ interchangeably with the phrase ‘Psychological Warfare.’ What you are interested in, they call Computer Network Attack.”
“Yes, right, Rusty. General, what can we do in this Computer Network Attack business?” Reynolds asked.
The General, still holding a small laser pointing device aimed at the screen, shifted on his feet and looked again at the SecDef, who sat poker faced. “Well, sir, that’s all restricted, but I guess I can tell you, huh? We have developed some ability, especially after the Cyber Crash of 2009, to do some offensive work. Although frankly, sir, most of our attention is on information collection, not disruption. But we could, if ordered, do some things to some countries’ air defense radar and some of their communication systems. I mean, if we had enough lead time and support from CIA, NSA, and the others.”
Wallace Reynolds sat staring at the general.
There was a brief knock on the door and a member of the Situation Room watch team entered the room and passed a folded note to MacIntyre. He realized, as he read it, that all eyes in the room were on him. He folded the paper back up and turned to Wallace Reynolds. “Other nations apparently have the ability to do more, like turn out the electrical power in half our country,” Rusty said dryly.
“What do you mean?” Secretary Neyers asked.
“All electrical power grids are down west of the Mississippi, except in Texas. That does not happen by accident,” Rusty asserted. “The attack on our cyberspace and technology that started on Sunday, by disconnecting our cyberspace from the rest of the world, and continued with attacks on some of our major labs and commercial communications satellites, probably including the assassination of the heads of our federal science agencies, has now involved the largest power blackout in American history, one hundred million Americans thrown into chaos.”
“If this is supposed to convince us to back off from the China-Taiwan dispute, I think it’s having the opposite effect on me,” the Secretary of Defense asserted.
“You don’t know that China did this,” Neyers replied.
“It wasn’t Botswana, Brenda,” Chesterfield shot back. His answer hung in the air.
Finally, Wallace Reynolds looked at Rusty MacIntyre. “How long will they be out?”
“Don’t know.”
Reynolds looked at Neyers and Chesterfield, who said nothing, then back at MacIntyre. “Can you go find out, Rusty? And while you’re out there, ask the folks on the Situation Room watch team if we have an emergency generator. Have them check it.”
1230 EST
Finneran’s Boatyard
Marsh Harbor, Abaco Island
The Bahamas
“Are you lookin’ to go to Hopetown?” the old man said from the boat. His aging face was brown, creased deeply, with white stubble sprouting here and there. “You Miss Connor? I’m Mr. Waters, Charles Waters.”
“Yes—are you here to take me across?” Susan asked, evoking a broad smile in the man. Several of his front teeth were missing. The thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler had twin battery-powered outboard motors, and the old man handled the new-looking boat as if it had been his for decades, a part of his body. He kept the speed down until he had maneuvered around the sailboats and docks in the harbor. Then, clear of Abaco Island, he opened it up for the short run across to Elbow Cay and its harbor at Hopetown. It was still winter in Washington, but in the Bahamas the temperature was in the low seventies, and Susan Connor felt the warmth of the sun as the boat bounced across the perfectly flat sea between the islands.
“Been to our ‘Islands in the Stream’ before, miss?” Waters asked.
“No, but I read the book,” she replied, trying not to show her surprise at the boatman’s Hemingway reference. “Is this the place?”
He nodded his head. “These cays. But they say the Stream is beginning to shift now because of the ice meltin’ up north.”
At the northern end of the Bahamas, Abaco and its smaller barrier islands of Elbow Cay, Guana Cay, and Man-O-War lie to the east of the Gulf Stream, in line with Fort Lauderdale. Although largely unknown in the United States, the island cluster has always been affected by the large neighboring nation. The victory of the American revolutionaries in the 1780s created the first settlers, refugee colonial Loyalists from the Carolinas. The Prohibition era brought a different kind of American, one willing to chance a run across the powerful Gulf Stream to Florida, carrying rum and Scotch. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, state and federal laws and regulations against certain types of stem-cell organ generation and genetic engineering caused some Americans to quietly convert some large villa complexes into high-tech labs and clinics.
“Still pretty shallow here,” Susan noted. She sat in the seat by the windshield to the left of the old man, looking over the side and through the clear water at the rocks and sea grasses below.
“Doesn’t get anything but shallow in these islands, not till you go out into Atlantic, other side of Elbow Cay beyond the reef,” Mr. Waters said as he drove with one hand and sipped a Red Stripe with the other. “We don’t get many sisters goin’ to Elbow or Man-O-War. They still white man’s islands.”
“Really. I didn’t know there were a lot of whites outside of Nassau,” Susan yelled back.
“They been here since they ran out the Carolinas when Georgie Wash done won the war. Inbred and all. Talk funny.” He cut the engine as they approached the mouth of a waterway leading into the interior of Elbow Cay. “Now they’re a few little hotels and cabins on Elbow Cay for tourists, but Man-O-War’s still just them original families. They make good boats out on Man-O-War and there’s a coupla big villas, but mainly its them same white-folk families that come in the seventeen hundreds.” The
boat turned a corner to reveal a little crescent-shaped harbor, dominated on the right by a candy-cane-styled lighthouse and on the left by a series of short docks attached to open air bars. Even though the temperature was in the high sixties, women in tank tops and shirtless men sat at tables in the sun. They were the white tourists who had found a place off the beaten path. Rock music from one bar’s speakers bounced across the water toward the lighthouse.
“This here’s Captain Jack’s,” Mr. Waters explained as he threw a line onto the dock, “where you s’pose to be. I got your bag. Pleasure to take you across.”
Susan now saw the man who caught the rope. He was tall, broad, in a short-sleeved blue Oxford button-down and white slacks. He was black and, Susan thought immediately, handsome. “Miss Connor, Mr. Gaudium sent me. I’m Arnold Scott.” He helped her out of the boat and led her to a table under an umbrella. “I assumed you wouldn’t have eaten, so I took the liberty of ordering you some lunch. Grouper and conch fritters, fresh and locally caught.”
Over lunch, Scott kept to small talk about the islands and about himself. He said he had been told not to ask any details about Susan. She wondered what he knew. He was a graduate of Morehouse, class of 2003 ROTC. He had been out of the Army, Special Forces, almost two years. And he really enjoyed working for Dominion Commonwealth Services.
“Let’s take a walk so we can talk more about what we’re going to be doing,” Arnie Scott suggested. They left the dock bar and wandered down the dirt road lined with small, pastel-colored cottages, an old London red telephone booth and a red British Royal Mail box. There were no cars on the island and little foot traffic. Susan noticed a golf cart beside a small grocery store. Scott suggested he show her the Atlantic side and the reef. They walked through the courtyard of a small hotel, the Hopetown Lodge, past its outdoor bar, to the beach. The bright white-sand beach seemed to stretch endlessly off to the right, entirely unoccupied by bathers. An almost unnaturally fluorescent turquoise water spread out from the beach to a line of foam a few hundred yards offshore. There, the Atlantic hit the long coral reef protecting the cay.
“Kind of ironic. Ponce de Leon landed here almost exactly five hundred years ago looking for the fountain of youth. Now these guys come here seeking life-extension genes,” Scott said, shaking his head in disgust. “The lab is at the far end of Man-O-War Cay, which is the next island over in the chain. It’s a big villa, walled off, with its own dock. They usually fly the patients directly to the dock on a seaplane from Fort Lauderdale. They spend a night, maybe two. Get tested and then do the procedure.”
The March sea kept up a constant roar as it crashed on the reef a few hundred feet away.
“Arnie, exactly what do we know about the procedure?” she asked while looking out to sea.
“Only the basics. We think they add the new chromosomes to the embryo, probably in vitro. We’re hoping you find out more. However they do it, they have a high rate of success, a money-back guarantee, and no complaints that we could find.” He shook his head in disgust, “Its like that movie Gattica, where you could order up whatever added features you want in your kid. You just pay more for each addition.”
Susan stopped and sat on the sand near the water’s edge. “The ruling elite, the first wave of an entirely new genus.”
“Let’s hope they’re the first and the last,” Scott said bitterly. He continued to stand, towering above Susan.
Susan looked up at her escort. “Are you, like, a foot taller than me or what?” she asked, trying to get him to loosen up.
“Only eight inches,” Scott said, and chuckled. She thought he had a pleasant face when he was smiling, not trying to be Army guy.
“And seven years younger, and we are supposed to be married and wealthy?” Susan rattled off what she knew of their cover story from reading the folder Gaudium had left for her on his plane. “Would you believe that shit?”
“I made three hundred thousand a year for three years in Iraq. You are a partner in a major consulting firm in Boston. You got yourself a smart, rich, young stud,” Scott said as though he were only reciting the lines he had been given. “The height thing…I don’t know about that.”
“Did you make three hundred thousand a year in Iraq?” she asked.
“Hell no,” he said definitively. “I did the same thing as guys getting three hundred K working for those private firms, but I was still in the Army, ma’am—I got one-tenth of that amount.”
They walked along the empty beach away from the town. “Let’s go over how this is supposed to work and what I’m supposed to find out,” Susan asked.
“My orders are to let you satisfy yourself that there is an offshore facility creating designer babies with extra chromosomes,” Scott explained. “They bring in nine women at a time, by the way, three times a week, and they have been doing that for almost a year and a half. If you can, find out exact numbers, ideally their addresses.”
“Can’t you steal their database?” She thought she’d push a little further. “Hackers?”
“These guys are smart. Their computers aren’t connected to the internet. They don’t use wireless.” Scott stopped in the sand. “If you can, if you are alone in a room with a terminal or printer, there’s a tiny bug I’ll give you. It transmits out far enough for us to pick it up with an antenna and relay hidden in a rock we’ll place on the beach. That could set up a path to get us into their LAN.”
Susan listened and then started walking down the beach again. “And we didn’t fly in on their seaplane because…”
“They only fly in the mothers, and our story is that you wanted me to come along, wanted to relax first with a few days on the beach,” he answered, catching up with her. “They won’t let me in, but I’ll take you over to Man-O-War in the morning and walk you up the Queen’s Highway to the gate by seven-thirty tomorrow morning.”
“Queen’s Highway?” she repeated.
“It’s another sand-and-dirt path that runs from one end of the cay to the other. Their idea of a joke over on Man-O-War,” Scott said, and flashed a toothy smile. Susan was thinking what was he doing working for some private security company and what was it doing working with Gaudium? Then Susan heard herself asking Arnie a question her subconscious generated: “Does Will manage the company now or just own it?”
“Oh, I think he’s just the owner,” Scott replied. “He’s so busy with everything else he does.”
“Yes, I know. Senator George came by the winery while I was there with Will. Have you met him yet? Dynamic speaker.”
“Yes, yes, he is,” Scott enthused. “I was on his protective detail for a week and then this assignment came up.”
Susan lifted her sunglasses onto her head. “And where are the two rooms, might I ask, where the Scott couple are supposed to be spending the night?”
“Dominion has a house on Man-O-War we’ve been using for the surveillance, but I assumed you might want to stay in a hotel, so I got you a room here in the Hopetown Lodge. The boatman brought your bag there. Unless you want me to hang around, I’ll bring the boat over from Man-O-War and pick you up at seven tomorrow.”
“See you then,” Susan replied, thanking her instinct or subconscious or wherever that question about Will and the security firm had come from.
After Arnold Scott left on his boat back to Man-O-War, she walked slowly down to the water’s edge. She felt alone, out on a limb. What was she doing on an out of the way little island no one had ever heard of, by herself? She had signed up to be an analyst. But she had wanted more, to be involved, on the edge with the most important issues, crises. Now, as Rusty had done in the Islamyah crisis, she was playing it solo in the field, like an agent. She was not trained for this. She had almost been killed at Moffett Field. Even Jimmy had almost been killed at Twentynine Palms. And where had it got them? Sol had to fly off to Hong Kong, grasping at straws, trying to avoid a showdown with China. What had she done? She looked out at the surf on the reef.
Gaudium. She had found h
im and come to understand him, really sympathize with and appreciate him. Nonetheless, putting aside emotion, although she could not prove it yet, the analytical side of her brain was telling her there was a connection between him and the attacks. There had to be. He actually owned the security company that was protecting Senator George and had ex–Special Forces guys like Arnie Scott doing surveillance on in vitro fertilization labs. Gaudium was aware of the Man-O-War lab and, if Soxster was right, the hacker Packetman was, too. Packetman had said they were going to eliminate something. And Packetman had worked at the ranch that Jimmy had raided, the ranch from where somebody had attacked the Marines and probably the satellites, the people who were planning to kill hundreds. Shit! Was that the Hiroshima event Will had in mind?
Susan felt for her BlackBerry. Its battery still had juice. She needed to call Jimmy. She hit his speed-dial number. Nothing happened. There was no cell service on this side of Elbow Cay! She ran up the beach to the hotel. At the outdoor bar, the bartender was laughing with an American couple, handing them drinks with little umbrellas. There was a phone on the bar. It would be better to use it; her room phone might be bugged. “I’m staying here,” she gasped. “Can I use this phone to call the States?” She called Jimmy’s mobile number.
“How’s the patient?” she asked.
“Great. I just took the bandages off and I can see fine, better than before,” Jimmy said as he stared out of his apartment window in Battery Park City, zooming in on the Jersey shore. “You heard about California and the west, the blackout? Almost a hundred million people without power. They’re saying it could not have been an accident.”
“Shit, that will put even more pressure on the President to do something to somebody,” she said, walking with the cordless phone to a table near the bar.
“Find anything yet in the Bahamas?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I think so. Remember Soxster said a hacker knew about Man-O-War and how the hackers were going to penetrate something, stop something?”
Breakpoint Page 19
