Lethal Code

CHAPTER 1

Lana Elkins watched her daughter, Emma, sweep into the kitchen so quickly that she was immediately suspicious. More so when her fourteen-year-old positioned herself behind the cooking island, which could hide whatever skimpy outfit she’d just put on for school.

Lana waved her to the side. “Come on, let me see.”

Emma’s dark eyes flared as she moved begrudgingly into view.

“That’s just over the top,” Lana said, shaking her head at the gauzy mauve miniskirt. “You can’t possibly sit and be decent in that.”

“Yes, I can,” Emma insisted, helping herself to a frozen waffle that Lana had toasted for her.

With her long black hair, fair skin, and freckles sprinkled delightfully across her nose, Emma bore a sharp likeness to her attractive mother. But the girl’s getup worried Lana, who knew that some boys would stop at little if they thought they’d been lured.

The daily battle over Emma’s outfits was getting tiresome. Lana had often wished a wholesome adult male were around to share the responsibility of child rearing, especially with Emma starting to experiment with alcohol. But the man who’d fathered Emma was neither wholesome nor present, having fled for good as Emma entered toddlerhood, which might have been for the—

Lana’s thoughts were silenced by the lights turning dark in the kitchen. So did the matching sconces in the hallway a few feet away. A sunny September morning, but all the bulbs turned cold in a blink.

She looked around, listening to the refrigerator shut down. It sounded like a strangely human groan. The whole house seemed to settle at once, as if the power had drained not only from lamps and stove and radio but also from the concrete foundation itself.

She glanced at her watch: 7:40. In five minutes she was planning to drive Emma to school in suburban D.C.

“What’s happening?” asked Emma as she stared at the blank readout on the espresso machine, a forkful of waffle frozen in the air.

“I’m not sure.” Lana stepped to the bay window in the living room. Her neighbor, a pale-haired gent in his seventies, was peering up and down the street while wearing an aqua blue bathrobe, as if to spy a light in someone else’s house. The weather looked clear, headed for another hot day, but Lana recalled no warnings about thunderstorms. “Could be a blackout from all the air conditioners,” she thought aloud.

Pulling out her smartphone, she tapped a quick text to ask a few of her cybersecurity firm colleagues if the outage was affecting them. Strangely, her phone wouldn’t transmit, despite being fully charged. With a sigh, she called up the browser to check the Web for news.

No service? Lana knew their phones should work. At the very least, she should be able to get online.

Emma, a famously fast texter, worked her own phone, and then looked across the living room with a “fix it” plea in her eyes.

“Everything’s shut down,” said Lana as she tried — and failed — to resend her text.

“What’s happened?” Emma demanded.

“I’m not sure.”

Lana pulled out her satphone, which connected directly to communication satellites, bypassing any earthbound blackout. That phone had service, so she feverishly tried other Internet service providers in the farther reaches of the country. None was available.

Emma drifted close to her side as distant sirens came alive in a chilling chorus. No blackout had ever shut off power to the whole country or knocked out ground-based communications so thoroughly. Those two startling facts kindled Lana’s deepest fear: that a massive cyberattack had targeted the nation’s grid, a conclusion based on all she had learned during her decade as a cyberspy at the National Security Agency — and in the years since she’d started her own security firm, CyberFortress. As far as the power and communications were concerned, the U.S. had just turned into one big blank. And if that were true, the next stage, which could come quickly, might be bedlam.

She grabbed her bag and fished out her key fob. “I don’t think there’s going to be school today. I need you to stay home until I find out for sure what’s going on. Do not go out or open any windows. You’ll just let the hot air in.”

In any potential disaster, Lana knew you wanted to keep the house as airtight as possible for reasons far more frightening than hot air, but she spared Emma those fears.

“I don’t want to stay home,” Emma complained. “If there’s no school, I’m hanging out with my friends.”

“Listen to me, please.” Lana stepped closer to her daughter. “First of all, there may be school. Just let me find out. But if there isn’t, there could be problems today. Things should be fine, but if the power is off all around the area, people might start doing stupid things.”

“What stupid things?” Worry softened Emma’s voice, bringing out the child in the adolescent.

“I don’t know,” Lana said. “Hopefully nobody will do anything stupid. But I don’t want you wandering the streets if this turns into an emergency. So stay inside and keep the doors locked. I’ll come back and get you if this is just a local problem.”

Fat chance, Lana added, but only to herself: Those sirens were growing louder.

She hurried into the garage, lifted the heavy door by hand, then headed directly for CyberFortress in her Prius. Her company had ample emergency power; hopefully, she’d get some answers there.

A lot of other people must have decided to seek greener pastures as well, because traffic was even heavier than usual.

Lana inched toward a railroad overpass, stunned when she failed to find a single radio station after scanning the dial. All she heard were those sirens. The radio’s silence was yet another bad sign.

A shadow fell over her, and she realized she was under the trestle.

More stop-and-go eased her back into the bright sunlight. She found herself drumming the steering wheel.

Still moving slowly, she came to a stop on a slight rise about two hundred feet beyond the crossing. Seconds later, a horrendous screech of train brakes turned her attention to her rearview mirror. An Amtrak Acela Express was heading straight toward a Norfolk Southern locomotive with a long line of freight cars, including fuel and ammonia tankers.

Lana strangled the steering wheel when the two trains collided thunderously. The Amtrak slid toward the railing. The steel bent like licorice. Astounded, Lana watched the engine car tumble slowly over the edge of the concrete overpass. Passenger cars twisted off the rails one by one, flattening automobiles and SUVs across all four lanes.

She could no longer avoid acknowledging her worst suspicions, because they had just become tragically clear: The grid’s down. After all our warnings.

Much of the work she did every day — often involving developing counterespionage measures against Chinese hackers — was meant to avert this very crisis: not just losing the grid, but all the devastation its loss would entail. It was unfolding before her very eyes.

The crushed nose of the Norfolk Southern locomotive pointed toward the ongoing tragedy, as if it were content to merely peer into the abyss. But not for long: The engine car broke through the demolished railing and also began to fall.

Lana saw a mother with an infant race out from under the engine car’s shadow. But a man tangled in a seat belt made it only halfway out of his big pickup before he was crushed to death.

Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.

Cars on both trains slammed down from the elevated tracks in a perversely syncopated series of terrifying crashes.

Lana heard a lone scream, horrific and piercing — followed quickly by scores of others.

Then the explosions began.