by Matt Rogers
Slater said, ‘You mean like draping a veil over the whole thing? Putting up a façade?’
Violetta nodded.
She opened her mouth to continue, but Slater said, ‘Are you getting at what I think you’re getting at?’
She looked at him. ‘Do you know about Iran?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, yes,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m getting at.’
‘They did that to us?’
‘It’s not Iran who did it,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t know how.’
King held up a hand. They both stopped talking. He said, ‘Could you enlighten the pre-schooler in the room, please? I know a lot of what happened in Iran, but I don’t think I’m following what you two are talking about.’
Violetta said, ‘The engineers sitting in the operations centres of our substations didn’t see it. As far as they were concerned, everything was running smoothly. The way these systems stay running smoothly is to have the right balance between the supply and demand of electricity. If that balance is achieved, all is well. But it doesn’t take much to tip the scales.’
‘Surely there are safeguards against that,’ King said. ‘You’re not seriously telling me that it was invisible until—’
‘Yes,’ Violetta said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you.’
King looked across at Slater, but he didn’t seem disbelieving. Far from it. He looked resigned, and beat down, and battered.
Before the operation had even begun.
Violetta said, ‘That’s what the code did. It got into the system, and then parts of it got right to work. Cloaking its very existence. Taking over the electronic readings, and spitting out false feedback. No one knew a thing until they had enough control to lock out the power companies.’
No one spoke.
Violetta said, ‘And then they shut down all five boroughs of New York. With the snap of their fingers.’
King said, ‘This is ridiculous. It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie. It’s not that simple. I’m technologically challenged, but you can’t be telling me malicious code can do all of that.’
‘Of course it can,’ Violetta said.
‘How can you be so sure?’
Through clenched teeth, Slater muttered, ‘The U.S. did it first.’
King looked over.
Didn’t speak.
Violetta said, ‘He’s right. It can be done. We’d know.’
King stayed silent.
She said, ‘We did it to Iran.’
27
The gravity of it all compounded Slater’s headache.
Ever since Palantir had gone dark, he’d known about the possibilities of a hostile attack. They’d always been there, floating in the back of his head, whispering sweet nothings to him, trying to convince him that the world as he knew it could very well come crashing down around him. But he’d forced it aside until he met with Violetta, because there was no use fretting over something that might not be real.
But it was very real, and his worst suspicions were confirmed.
He envied King. The man hadn’t put it together yet. He was one of the most intelligent people Slater had met, and he was in no way naive, so Slater didn’t blame him or think he was an idiot. It seemed incomprehensible if you didn’t know the finer details.
Slater, unfortunately, was wise to the finer details.
Across the table, he exchanged a solemn glance with Violetta. Their eyes met for an instant, but they communicated everything.
Who should be the one to tell him?
Slater nodded his head an inch in her direction.
You.
Violetta didn’t react, but her eyes registered the passing of the torch.
King wasn’t an idiot. He noticed.
He said, ‘What?’
She sighed.
Slater said, ‘You’ll be able to explain it better than I will.’
‘Tell me,’ King said.
She said, ‘In 2008 we attacked Iran’s nuclear program. We worked with Israel to do it. We used malicious code as a digital weapon. It had never been done before on a scale like that. We pulled it off.’
King said, ‘Pulled what off?’
‘It was called Stuxnet. It was a computer worm. We unleashed it inside nuclear facilities in Iran. We shut down nearly a thousand centrifuges, and the engineers at the plants never knew it had happened until it was far too late. Stuxnet fed the engineers the wrong feedback. It showed everything in the green, when really we were eating away at the infrastructure from the inside. That’s the simplest way I can put it.’
King didn’t visibly react. Slater chewed his lower lip and waited for Violetta to continue.
She said, ‘That’s what happened to the power companies.’
‘Which power companies?’
‘Every single one of them that has a stake in the New York Metropolitan Area.’
‘Why here?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘What’s their motive?’
‘We don’t know.’
A pause.
Then King breathed out and said, ‘Holy shit.’
The stakes seemed to be dawning on him for the first time.
Slater sat back and waited for the inevitable follow-up.
King said, ‘Why don’t more people know about Stuxnet?’
Violetta said, ‘It’s out there. Books have been written about it. But no one cares, because no one in power will talk about it. Not us, and not Iran. Think about it. Why would we? And why would they? We don’t want to publicise it any more than they do. It makes them look vulnerable, and it shows that we were willing to do something that hadn’t ever been integrated with policy before. At least, not publicly.’
‘Digital warfare?’
‘Yes.’
King said, ‘Okay. Work backwards, then. Who has the resources to do this?’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘Sounds like there’s a few problems.’
‘We did some digging,’ she said, ‘and we realised that almost any rogue entity could have pulled this off. They just had to know where to aim.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Does this seem like the right atmosphere to start cracking jokes?’
Now, Slater sat forward.
He’d been listening without interjection, deep in his own head, piecing things together.
Now it all clicked.
‘That’s why they were able to do it,’ he said, his jaw slack. ‘Because of the power companies.’
‘Yeah,’ Violetta said.
King said, ‘Explain.’
Slater hunched forward and stared at the floor. He waited until he’d formed a clear narrative instead of spewing word vomit. If self-discipline had taught him anything, first and foremost it had shown him the benefit of patience.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said to Violetta, ‘but the power industry isn’t regulated by the government.’
She nodded.
He said, ‘So that means it’s cutthroat, suited for competition. And competition means moving fast. It means getting a leg up over the other guy. Which sometimes means being cheap.’
Another nod.
Slater said, ‘So there’s not really much of a barrier for entry, is there? If you were up to date on every scrap of groundbreaking technology, you could get past the old-school computer systems without much of an issue?’
A third nod.
Slater said, ‘You’d just have to know where to aim, as you said. Which wouldn’t be easy to figure out, but you could do it, if you were driven enough and had the resources.’
A final nod.
King said, ‘It can’t be that easy.’
‘It is,’ Violetta said. ‘And they did it. And nobody realised it was possible until it was too late.’
King said, ‘Look, I get it. It makes sense. It’s a simple sequence of events. The power industry wants to be independent from the government. That lets them cut co
rners, because there’s no oversight. They have terrible cybersecurity as a result. They pass it off as a non-issue, thinking no one would be smart enough to take advantage of the gaping holes in the system. And then it happens.’
Silence.
King said, ‘That exact scenario happens over and over again. Look at history. Something is impossible until it happens.’
All quiet.
King said, ‘I just can’t believe we were so stupid.’
‘We were,’ Violetta said. ‘And now we have forty-eight hours to get it back. Or all five boroughs are headed for disaster.’
Slater exchanged a wordless glance with his counterpart.
Two days.
Accurate, after all.
Slater said, ‘What happens in two days?’
‘Nothing good.’
‘Lay it out for us.’
‘It would take almost that long to give you a list of all the consequences,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure you can imagine how fast things will head south.’
‘Have you started evacuating New York?’ King said. ‘If you know for a fact this is hostile.’
Violetta stared at him. ‘Evacuate over eight million people?’
Silence.
She said, ‘How?’
Silence.
She said, ‘To where?’
Silence.
‘There’s no plan,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I’ve spoken to everyone who might know. Scale like this is unmanageable. It might have been, if there were concrete plans in place, plans for this very scenario. There aren’t.’
You could cut the tension in the air with a knife.
Neither Slater nor King felt the urge to speak. They were hypothesising, leaving the quiet to amplify and intensify until Violetta seemingly couldn’t take it anymore. She sat forward, drawing closer to them, and said, ‘We have leads. We have potential solutions. It’s not the end of the world yet. But we need to move, and we need to move now.’
‘Who’s we?’ King said.
‘The pair of you.’
‘I thought as much.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘What — you want me out there in the field with you?’
‘You’re more than capable of handling your own,’ King said. ‘You killed three men tonight.’
She didn’t speak.
‘Sorry,’ King said.
She lifted her head, pulled her composure together, and said, ‘That’s the reality of this line of work. If I thought I was going to be shielded from the front lines I never would have signed up for the job.’
To take her mind off what she had done, King said, ‘Can you give us a rough overview of what happens in two days?’
She brooded.
Chewed her lower lip.
Then said, ‘Absolute chaos.’
28
Rico stared at a sea of abandoned vehicles.
There was no longer anyone in the city with enough patience to try and wait it out in their cars. The bumper-to-bumper traffic had ground to a standstill hours ago. Pedestrians thronged through the gaps between the dormant cars and trucks and taxis, having realised there was no risk of getting sandwiched between them. Manhattan’s streets were now a stationary maze, easily navigable by foot but inconvenient for anyone looking to move fast.
The darkness didn’t help.
Phone lights glowed like stark pinpoints across the cityscape. Rico knew he might have been imagining it, but the amount of lights seemed fewer and farther between than at the beginning of the blackout. Maybe people were realising this might last longer than they thought. It would be wise to conserve their batteries if there was no hope of charging them for the foreseeable future.
He stopped his thoughts dead in their tracks, aware that he was sobering up.
He didn’t like that one bit.
Samuel said, ‘What are you doing? Why are we stopping?’
Rico drifted his gaze over. His vision swam — the after-effect of the drugs — but he could see the wide-eyed kid beside him clearly.
He didn’t like that either. Right now, numbness took precedence.
Then, like a holy sign from the gods, he looked in the other direction and saw a liquor store beside them. It was a cheap mom-and-pop operation, but that didn’t matter. It had spirits in bottles in the windows, and that was currently his number one priority. There were no lights on, and the door appeared locked, but that had never stopped anyone who put their mind to it.
Rico said, ‘I need a drink. Get your gun out.’
‘Here?’ Samuel said, looking around.
Now paranoid.
Rico lunged forward and seized him by the back of the neck. He pulled the kid in close and hissed, ‘You getting cold feet?’
Samuel eyed him with the unhinged menace of a psycho. ‘No.’
‘Prove it.’
Samuel nodded. Still wired to the eyeballs. Not much time had passed. He took the Glock out of his waistband, pointed it square at the small glass window in the liquor store’s door, and fired a shot.
The report exploded, unsuppressed, down the street.
A few people screamed. Most just scattered. Even though his senses were dulled, Rico could see the outlines of civilians fleeing like wraiths. If there’d been power, and lights, and order, and control, the gunshot might have been a bigger deal. But there were none of those things. Just the steady realisation settling over the city that perhaps this wasn’t a temporary problem after all. Perhaps each and every resident of New York would soon be fending for themselves. Perhaps civilised society was hanging on by a thread.
Rico knew that concept would fill him with dread if he was sober.
He reached through the broken window frame, taking care not to cut his wrists on the jagged pieces of leftover glass, and turned the lock on the inside of the door. Then he pushed down on the handle and stepped inside.
Samuel followed.
His footsteps echoed. The atmosphere was muffled. Almost as dark as outside, but claustrophobic. Rows and rows of shelves, stocked with bottles of booze, barely illuminated by a mixture of moonlight and the haloes of phone flashlights filtering in from the street. The atmosphere was positively ethereal. Rico couldn’t see much, but his new friend was armed, and that gave him all the confidence he needed. He sauntered deeper into the store and fetched a bottle of whiskey off the nearest shelf.
Rolled it over in his palm, scrutinising the label.
Then he nodded with satisfaction and turned back to see Samuel shivering.
In both fear and excitement.
His eyes were wider than ever.
Rico followed Samuel’s gaze and found an old man at the other end of it. Hispanic, with brown weathered skin and almost no other discernible features. It was hard to make out much of what was happening in the lowlight, but Rico could see, plain as day, that the guy had a pump-action shotgun in his hands. He was aiming it at Samuel’s belly. Samuel had his Glock pointed at the old man’s head.
The shop owner, no doubt.
A standstill.
Samuel laughed, and the sound ricocheted off the walls.
No, not a laugh, Rico thought.
More of a cackle.
Suddenly Rico sensed the depravity of his new friend.
Samuel was genuinely enjoying this.
Rico’s heart throbbed, three beats a second.
Samuel said, ‘Put that down, buddy.’
The owner growled, ‘Get out of my store.’
‘We will. As soon as we’re done getting what we need.’
‘No. Get out now.’
Samuel feigned mock horror. ‘But my friend here needs a drink.’
‘Fuck your friend. Tell him to put that bottle down and get out.’
‘Tell him yourself.’
‘I’m not playing around,’ the owner said. ‘Out. Now.’
Samuel’s right hand stayed rigid gripping the Glock, fixed in place. But his left started shaking. It trembled and the fingers jerked up and down like marionette strings.
Rico noted it, and figured the kid was more unstable than he thought.
Samuel’s eyes went wider than ever.
Samuel said, ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘No,’ the old man said.
‘Do you know what I’m capable of?’
The owner didn’t respond. Clearly he’d reached the limits of his patience. He wasn’t about to indulge in faux-gangster dialogue, and Rico started to sympathise. Irritation nagged at him, and he took a step forward to get closer to Samuel.
Under his breath, he muttered, ‘Let’s go, man. I’ve got what I need.’
‘No,’ the owner said, his voice terse. ‘Put the bottle down.’
But Rico wasn’t about to do that. He needed to avoid clear thoughts like an addict needed the hot spoon.
Samuel cocked his head to one side, his left hand still vibrating. Then, keeping his aim unmoving, he turned to look at Rico and said, ‘Get a load of this motherfucker. He clearly doesn’t know. But you know. You know…’
Rico didn’t say anything.
Know what? he thought.
Samuel turned back to the shop owner and said, ‘See how there’s no lights? See how it’s all dark? I did this. Me. I run this city, old man. I helped create this and if you think for one second I’m going to let you tell me what to—’
Then the shop owner did something incomprehensibly stupid.
Midway through Samuel’s tirade, the old man lunged forward. Lowering his own shotgun. Stretching one hand out, fingers reaching, palm open. Trying to get a hold of Samuel’s Glock.
Listening to the spiel, he must have figured the kid was deranged and opted to try and diffuse the tension by wrestling the gun away.
Bad move, Rico thought. He’s deranged, but he’s not detached.
The owner only made it halfway to the Glock before Samuel pulled the trigger and shot him in the chest.
It was hard to see where exactly the bullet impacted in the dark. The body fell face-first to the cold tiles and lay still. Rico didn’t look down. He was no stranger to the thrill of doing things that were off-limits, but this was…
