by Thomas Waite
She hurried to his car and shut off the lights. She didn’t want anyone stopping. His radio wasn’t on. He might have been off the clock. Of course, freelancing. She looked for his gun. A quick search didn’t turn it up, but she found his Taser and took it. She wanted to make sure he was dead, and sure didn’t want to check his pulse.
Alexandra came up beside her. Galina was about to tell her girl to get back in the car, then thought better of it.
“Wait here, okay?”
Alexandra nodded.
Galina returned to the passenger side of the Porsche. One of Tattoo’s hands was draped limply over the edge of the seat. She thought it was the one he’d used to choke her.
She tased it. No reaction.
Galina dragged and pushed and finally hauled him onto the shoulder of the road, swearing at him silently.
The Macan’s black leather seats were smeared with his blood. So were her legs and belly.
She wiped it off herself with her torn skirt, and used the sullied fabric to clean up the seats as much as she could. She took a fresh skirt from her suitcase and slipped it on, moving feverishly, frightened almost senseless that a car could come along and stop. One had raced by on the other side of the highway when he was attacking her. Others might have as well. Someone could have called the police. Two cars by the side of the road in the middle of the night? Suspicious, especially to a citizenry trained to be wary.
“Let’s go,” she said to Alexandra, who wanted to sit next to her.
Of course, her daughter was terrified, shaking. She wanted to be near her mother.
Galina pulled a dress from her suitcase and draped it over the passenger seat. She didn’t want Alexandra to get a trace of that animal’s blood on her.
They drove away. Only then did Galina understand that she’d been wheezing and hadn’t taken a full breath in minutes. Her throat hurt, but as they gained speed—and distance from Tattoo’s body—she began to relax enough that she stopped sounding asthmatic.
Alexandra’s eyes were closed. She looked like she was sleeping. Galina put on the radio, keeping the volume low. She wanted to know about Antarctica. Was it still there? Who really knew what a nuclear missile would to do the ice continent?
The explosion had taken place, as threatened, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The radio announcer’s voice was grave. For good reason: more than three thousand scientists and support staff from around the world had died, swept to their death by powerful blast waves. Now, nuclear snow was said to be falling on parts of the southern ocean.
“And the seas are rising,” the announcer reported.
Not over centuries, Galina thought, as so many of those men and women on Antarctica had predicted, but with the speed of terrorism itself. And that was very fast, indeed.
She shut off the radio and kept driving, grieving as first light creased the eastern sky. She wasn’t sure where they would go. Only that there was no turning back.
CHAPTER 15
THE SILENCE IN LANA’S NSA office belied the tragedies on several split-screen monitors she kept tuned to government and commercial news feeds. she’d muted the sound, needing to hear nothing more of drowning victims, environmental devastation, and the open panic of the world’s population. The massacre of all the scientists and support personnel in Antarctica was so shocking that she still had difficulty comprehending the loss, made personal when she learned that her college roommate, a renowned paleoclimatologist, had been among the murdered.
The Trident II had hit the continent just north of the Thwaites Glacier at an altitude of about two miles to exert maximum damage from the air. Not a direct strike but close enough to immediately calve glacial chunks the size of Rhode Island into the southern ocean—and incinerate billions of tons of ice now forming massive blizzards that were sweeping across the seas.
Scientists had long considered Thwaites crucial for holding so much of the region’s ice in place, but the blast had widened the glacier’s mouth. And it most certainly had compromised its grounding line, the border of the land that supported the ice and the body of water that would receive it. Glaciologists were certain the explosion would speed up the glacier’s path to the sea, which had been expected to take hundreds of years. The potential for a death toll in the billions from the missile strike would turn into a fast-forward reality if all the ice backed up behind Thwaites were shaken loose, as so many experts now feared.
None of the experts working for, or consulted by, the Defense Department were predicting anything but the most dire ramifications from the explosion.
“Expect sea level rise for a period of weeks, maybe months,” had been the bulletin from DOD. “Expect severe radiation poisoning as polar easterlies carry toxic plutonium from the continent. Expect disturbances both domestic and foreign among threatened populations.”
The parched language of panic.
Already, scientific consensus held that the world was heading for an absolute minimum rise of a meter—if the planet were exceedingly lucky and all of the WAIS didn’t crash into the ocean, a catastrophe that would lift sea levels the full eleven feet. But a meter still constituted a century’s worth of warming in the geological equivalent of a blink.
Trampling had become the leading cause of death in low-lying countries, such as Bangladesh, as populations crowded along coastlines raced away from rising waters. The number of victims already numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Nauru, and other nations throughout Oceania were losing territory—and lives—by the minute.
But the biggest numbers of victims might yet hail from the biggest names in cities: New Orleans, which looked as if Hurricane Katrina had returned on steroids; New York, where subway trains had been caught in flooded tunnels, killing more than one thousand passengers; Los Angeles, where famed beach communities had been obliterated; Tokyo, where trampling killed hundreds; and Amsterdam, where even centuries of living below sea level could scarcely prepare the populace for such a swift onslaught of the ocean. The compounding tragedies also included Mumbai, Shanghai, Singapore, Jakarta, and Dhaka. Water treatment plants were flooded; basic sanitation had washed away with the floods; diseases, such as dysentery, were predicted to become epidemic; and widespread starvation was expected within days.
In the U.S., Miami was a worst-case scenario all on its own—possibly in a literal sense: Southeast Florida was among the most imperiled places on the planet, and if the waters kept rising, Miami would be cut off from mainland America within two weeks. It was not hard to imagine that in the next century its famed high-rises would form coral reefs as dead as so many of nature’s had already become.
Traffic on I-95 and I-75, heading north out of Florida, was choked by vehicles that had run out of fuel. Truck stops had shut down, only to be looted by motorists, including armed families, desperate for food and water and nonexistent gasoline. Shopping centers throughout the Sunshine State were ablaze, a fast-moving phenomenon not confined to Florida cities. It was as if arsonists were trying to fight floods with fire.
The mayhem was almost incomprehensible, and yet it made perfect sense to Lana. The world as people had known it all their lives was ending.
Meetings of every conceivable government agency remotely related to climate change, emergency services, and the nation’s security were underway, but as Holmes had confided to his closest aides only hours ago, “It mostly comes down to what we can do to stop these madmen.” Tellingly, his eyes had landed on Lana.
What her eyes could not avoid taking in now was the video once more feeding from the Delphin. The ghostly interior of the submarine, strewn with dead bodies, now looked like a preview of what the hackers had planned for the rest of the world.
This is how we got started, she imagined one of them saying, but soon this will be everywhere.
She told herself to look, really look at that sub. Hacking it, hijacking a nuclea
r missile, had been almost inconceivable—until it happened. Just as it had been difficult to comprehend the atomic bomb before Hiroshima, or the most virulent hate before the Holocaust. Or any number of other mass deaths.
She also kept the sound muted for the sub. Just look, she told herself again. She didn’t want to be distracted by the white noise coming from a submarine that had become a submerged crypt.
The only person she saw alive was First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez, who had moved back into frame.
What are the odds, she wondered, that the man in charge of the Missile Control Center had survived? The very officer who knew the intricacies of launching the missiles.
Yes, she was aware he’d been vetted thoroughly since the hijacking, but she called Jensen anyway and told her CyberFortress VP to join her at NSA. She’d always made sure he was available full-time to run the show at her security firm, but if they didn’t stop this madness quickly, there would be no CF or much else of value to save.
He arrived looking graver than she’d ever seen him, and that was saying quite a lot about her Mormon right-hand man with his rock solid beliefs in a family-filled afterlife.
She pointed to the screen.
“Poor guy,” the navy veteran said. “Can you imagine being down there, still alive?”
“That’s why I want you to check out Gomez every which way from Sunday. I know DOD did that, but I’d like you to do it one more time. Come in cold. Don’t take any of the routes DOD did. Treat Gomez like a blank slate in that regard, the tabula rasa of cyberspace.”
“You sure you want me to take time for that now?”
Jensen had been helping Lana with the link analysis and network profiling to figure out just what was going on in that apartment building in Moscow.
“Yes, this is your priority.”
He looked dubious, and she could hardly blame him. But she was in a “fire all guns” mode, and that included questioning even the putative heroics of a sailor like Gomez.
Besides, she’d begun to worry the hacker she’d been communicating with anonymously had detected Jeff’s fingerprints analyzing the metadata from the apartment building, light to invisible though she believed them to be.
She returned to that data bulge on her own, keeping a satellite feed of the Moscow building in the corner of one of her screens. She wasn’t sure why. She’d had the impulse so she’d put it there. A reminder of the hacker’s essential humanity, perhaps? His or her habitat? Sometimes her instincts paid off, so she left it there.
In the next hour she came across emails to an Oleg Dernov. Those provided the first concrete information beyond the large-scale communication patterns. It was so easily unearthed that Lana was suspicious. More so when she found Dernov was a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the son of one of Russia’s wealthiest plutocrats.
“I’ve been handed this,” Lana said aloud to herself. Set up? she wondered. Disinformation had long been the coin of the realm for so much of the spy trade. Why would it be any different in cyberspace?
Or?
The hacker, for whatever reason, wanted to give Dernov to her.
Hmmm. Lana stared at the IRC page on her screen that she shared with the hacker in that building, glancing at the satellite feed once more. At least she hoped it was shared only by the two of them. She typed a message:
“I’ve found a man’s name. Prominent. Did you give that to me?”
She wondered how long she’d have to wait for an answer, imagining the seas rising a foot or two before the hacker deigned to respond.
Not much more than a second, as it turned out: “Yes.”
“Why?”
“You are too intelligent not to know.”
Or I’m too stupid not to see that I’m getting set up here. Worked, as it were, by a twenty-first-century barker in a cybersideshow who likely wanted to lure away her attention and keep her busy with worthless distractions.
She decided to hold off on a response, searching the metadata for more easily accessed emails. She found the hacker had all but put a welcome mat down for her, starting with several emails to a pediatric oncologist named Dr. Kublakov. That was when she learned that the hacker whom she’d been communicating with might be an individual named Galina Bortnik. Also—possibly—that she had a six-year-old daughter named Alexandra with leukemia.
Personal facts, now, served on a platter?
More to the point, what does she want from me?
Could this be the hacker’s version of the classic honey trap, but instead of seducing with sex the hacker preyed upon the vulnerable emotions of a mother with a daughter?
Lana’s skin suddenly went cold.
Could she know that as well?
Don’t be stupid, Lana chided herself at once. Of course she could. Or they could, if the hacker were part of a group, as she’d originally presumed. Lana’s cover had been revealed after last year’s attack and her counterattack. Her identity in the real world was clearly known. The question, though, was did “Galina” have the technological wherewithal to have determined that Lana Elkins was the person she was speaking to in cyberspace? If the answer was yes, Lana realized that she might have met her match. The very thought produced a deeply uncomfortable and wholly unfamiliar feeling.
“Let’s come clean with each other,” Lana now wrote back.
“How do I know it is you?”
This gets convoluted, Lana thought, because the answer to that question depended on who the hacker thought “you” was. Lana could hardly answer without knowing that.
“We need to talk.”
“On a phone.”
“Yes,” Lana replied, excited, wary, heart pounding, yet bone weary from so little sleep for so many nights.
“Good.”
Here we go, Lana thought, sensing a riptide of events about to sweep her far from familiar shores. “Do you want me to call you?”
“No. Give me a secure line to call. If it is not secure, I will know and you will never hear from me again. That would be a great loss to the world.”
Now the hacker was trying too hard to lure her. Or perhaps too earnest for her own good?
Already accepting the female pronoun.
Lana thought about giving her the number for her secure NSA office landline phone, then shook her head. If she’s really good, I’ll never hear from her. So instead she gave up her cell number, which was as secure as the President’s. The hacker left the message board an instant later.
Given the pace of their back-and-forth messaging, Lana thought it likely that her phone would ring posthaste. The world had come to expect everything now. She was no exception, especially at this moment.
It didn’t ring. She looked at her phone. “Come on, damn it.”
“What was that?” Jensen asked, hurrying into her office.
Almost two and a half hours had passed since she’d redeployed him.
“Nothing,” she replied. “What do you have?”
“Almost eighteen months ago Gomez—whose real name is Grisha Lisko, and is no more Mexican American than I am—became a member in good standing of the U.S. Navy, with goodness knows how-much help from his friends just across the Russian border. I say that because he’s Ukrainian by birth.”
“So he’s a sleeper agent.”
“That’s right, and he’s finally awake.”
“Lucky us.” Lana shook her head. “What do we get out of letting him know that we’re onto him? Or taking it straight to the Russians? He’s got to be working for them. I agree with you. No Ukrainian on his own, I don’t care how bright, gets the high-level training to be some hacker’s weapons expert on a nuclear sub.”
“It certainly gives us a better idea of how these terrorists could have overcome all the safeguards on that sub. I know DOD has been studying those scenarios but they couldn’t
figure out how it could possibly be done without Gomez, I mean Lisko, being part of the attack. Somebody trained him well.”
“Somebody Russian,” Lana said, wishing she could vaporize the Kremlin.
“This would certainly appear to confirm that.”
“Let’s go see Holmes.”
The deputy director was in his office with two Chinese officials, according to Donna Warnes, who raised her thin eyebrows the slightest bit when she imparted that information. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”
Holmes’s assistant nodded toward the couch. Though sleep deprived, Lana couldn’t bring herself to sit. They had two substantial leads: a woman with a sick cancer-ridden child and the wherewithal to make herself known to one person only—Lana. And Jensen’s identification of Grisha Lisko, a.k.a. Hector Gomez, whose swarthy looks and penchant for ethnic typecasting had let him flourish on a nuclear sub that he now, in effect, commanded.
Holmes ducked out of his inner sanctum to confer with them. Jensen nodded as Lana revealed the news about Lisko. She then briefed the deputy director about the individual going by the name Galina Bortnik.
“This woman, if that’s what she is, hasn’t called you yet?”
“No,” Lana answered. “She has not.”
“If she does, record it.”
“I plan to.”
“We’ll want to run it through voice analysis.”
“What if she wants to meet me?” Lana always tried to anticipate the next step.
Holmes shook his head slowly. She had known him long enough to recognize the gesture not as a negative response but a stalling pattern.
“What have we got to lose?” she asked him. “They’re launching nuclear warheads.”
“You,” he said simply. “We could lose you. You could be the prize in their response to this whole Internet forum gambit.”
His last word resonated for Lana, for it made her realize she hadn’t thought once about gambling since the real world stakes had escalated, much as last year she’d escaped any desire for poker by trying to stop the assault on the grid. Even the worst news, she realized, had a flip side.
