Lethal Code

CHAPTER 2

A tanker car, filled with ethanol, blew up with such force that shock waves shook the Prius as if it were made of lint. As the flash widened — engulfing the vehicles closest to the tracks — Lana looked ahead, frantic to get moving. But nothing in front of her budged. She turned back and saw boiling flames, several hundred feet away, heading toward her and gobbling up cars. Then she witnessed a series of violent explosions as their fuel tanks blew up, adding to the pandemonium.

She opened the door to run when two things happened at once: The outside air hit her like a huge broiler oven, forcing her back inside, and the blue Yukon in front of her started to speed away.

She drove as close to the big SUV as she dared, wishing she could see past its high profile but grateful to be moving at all — and acutely aware of the explosions that were chasing her.

Another quick glance in her rearview showed that fireballs were now reaching where she had been idling only moments ago — and they were still mushrooming outward.

“Don’t stop!” she screamed when the Yukon’s brake lights came on, but the driver must have been tail gating as closely as possible, just like Lana, because the red lights blinked off a half second later.

Too fearful to look back, she continued to ride that bumper as tightly as she could, feeling the temperature in the car rise. Sweat dripped down her brow and burned her eyes, and she smelled smoke. But when she did look back, she saw that she’d widened the gap between herself and the burgeoning hell storm.

In Lana’s side-view mirror, flames shot from the tops of mature cherry trees that had turned into tinder during the long hot summer. Cinders rose into the air, fiery seeds spreading the conflagration to a nearby park.

Up ahead, she spotted the first intersection after the overpass. She had driven through it countless times, but this morning it looked scary and surreal. The stoplight was dark, but somehow traffic just kept moving forward, which seemed like a miracle: that drivers — no doubt panicky themselves — were letting the cars in the most immediate danger pass through the intersection.

But it wasn’t a miracle. It was heroism. Young adults in satiny blue robes had linked arms and stationed themselves in front of the cross traffic on both sides of the four-way to keep the passage open for those escaping the disaster. A bus, the same bright blue color as the robes, had pulled up on a curb, CAPITOL BAPTIST CHURCH CHOIR painted on its side.

Lana filled with gratitude, not just for herself, but for the people in even greater peril behind her. Those kids out there were lifesavers of the first order.

She also spotted dozens of people running toward the flames and ongoing explosions, some carrying first aid kits, others bottled water; many bore nothing more than their considerable courage.

Lana wanted to join them, but not with cars still behind her trying to flee the deadly train wreck.

After driving about a mile she spied a place to pull over. She rushed to her trunk and pulled out her running gear, which she typically kept stored away till lunchtime. In less than two minutes she changed into her cross-trainers, running shorts, and a sleeveless top, leaving her heels, hose, and blouse strewn on the passenger seat.

She raced off to see what she could do. She had no special training, though she might be able to administer CPR, having taken two classes when Emma was an infant. Mostly, she was able-bodied and thought she could, at the very least, help the injured away from the smoke and flames.

But the open intersection where the young choir members had saved the lives of so many motorists had turned into gridlock. A couple of hundred yards beyond it, the fire still burned the cars and bodies trapped in the hungriest flames. The park near the tall cherry trees was also fully aflame; dark plumes rose from the plastic playground gear and soccer field stands.

A whole new set of sirens rent the air, but she could not see fire trucks, ambulances, or police cars; access had been cut off by the chockablock cars, most of them now abandoned. People were running off, arms full of belongings.

The sirens grew so loud that Lana might not have noticed a young woman’s cries for help if the teen hadn’t been waving her arms frantically; the satiny blue fabric caught Lana’s eye. A choir member, she realized. The girl looked just two or three years older than Emma. She was clearly distraught, huddling over a supine figure.

Lana hurried to her, finding the young woman cradling the head of a man wearing an identical robe. He was bleeding from his leg and hands. But his eyes were open, and he was conscious enough to notice her.

Crouching, Lana asked the girl how badly he was hurt.

“Real bad,” she said. “I’ve got to get him out of here, but I need help getting him up.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t. What happened to him?”

“We had to stop those cars,” the girl said, “but some of them wouldn’t, so we made them stop by forming a chain, but they kept bumping us, and then one of them hit Shawn pretty hard and then just ran him over and took off. Then a bunch of other cars started coming through. I barely got him out of the way. They would have killed him,” she added in disbelief.

Lana looked around. No help anywhere. “All right, let’s move him, if you think he can walk. I’ve got a car.”

“Shawn.” The girl leaned close to him. “We’re going to try to get you out of here.”

Smoke swept over them. He looked around, clearly worried. So was Lana. The fire was creeping closer.

“What’s your name?” Lana asked the young woman.

“Tanesa.”

“Okay, Tanesa, you take one arm and I’ll take the other. And let’s be careful of his hands.”

Shawn was lean, thankfully, but Lana and Tanesa still struggled to help him up. Once standing, though, he was able to put all his weight on his left foot. That’s when Lana noticed that he was missing his right shoe and that his anklebone was sticking out of that foot.

“How close is your car?” Shawn asked in a shaky voice.

“Not far.” Not true, but Lana wanted to give him hope.

She kept lying as he hopped along between them, an arm over each of their shoulders. Smoke billowed past them every few seconds. All of them coughed, Shawn most painfully of all; every movement made him grimace.

But Lana peppered him with lots of question, doing all she could to keep him from falling into shock. She learned that their prize-winning choir had just returned from a tour of rural churches in the Carolinas. He was an alto, Tanesa a soprano. Lana was already thinking of nominating them for community service awards, holding a fund-raiser — doing something to recognize their extraordinary courage.

After what seemed an interminable hike, the car appeared. But it was agony for the young man to get his right leg in the Prius. He pleaded with her to let him leave it out while she drove. That was inviting the foot’s complete ruin, but all Lana had to do was shake her head and, with a mighty howl, he used both hands to yank his leg into the car. More than his ankle had been broken, she saw now. It looked like the bones in his lower leg had also been snapped.

Lana rushed him to the nearest trauma center, Bethesda’s Suburban Hospital. Cars were already backing up.

“Tanesa, can you drive?”

“I’ve got my permit.”

“It’s an automatic. You take over. Inch along when you can. I’m going to get some help.”

Lana saw right away that the hospital had power, but it was from generators, she learned from an orderly; all electronic communications were down.

The orderly grabbed a gurney and followed her to the car. Tanesa rushed from the driver’s seat to Shawn’s side. With another grievous howl, the young man got his leg out and was wheeled away. Tanesa called back to Lana, thanking her profusely.

“I’ll see you later,” Lana yelled. “Promise.”

She had just paused for a breath when a cop rushed up and asked her to move the Prius, pronto.

In the scant minutes they’d been there, a massive lineup of cars had formed in back of them.

Lana pulled away, her thoughts turning to Emma immediately. “She’s all right,” she tried to assure herself. And when that didn’t work, Lana tried reasoning: The derailment and explosions were about a mile from their house. That was uncomfortably close, but the trains had fallen on the Bethesda side of the tracks, which meant the first responders would have accessed the disaster from Kressinger, where she and Emma lived. She figured the first line of defense for the firefighters should keep the blaze from spreading into her neighborhood. As long as Emma stayed put, she should be all right. That might be assuming too much, Lana realized at once. What she wouldn’t have given for a smartphone that worked. She tried her cell again anyway. No luck.

Driving home might take hours. CyberFortress, on the other hand, was just on the other side of Bethesda, and the company had emergency power.

That put Lana back on her original course to the bland-looking office park where she’d based her firm’s headquarters. The entrance bore no sign, no fancy logo toying with the “CF” that was the shorthand everyone used in intracompany communications.

She found about fifty employees, about a fifth of her workforce. She wasn’t surprised. Thankfully, they included Jeff Jensen, the crisply attired VP who handled internal security. He was running antivirus software of his own design on the company’s network, which he’d delinked from the Internet. That was in case a worm on the Web had set off a contagion that might lapse only long enough to deliver a second blow — in emulation of terrorists who set off a bomb to lure rescuers to a far more lethal strike.

The power came from generators that Lana had built into the system. You don’t work in the field of cybersecurity without having redundancy engineered into your power source.

“It smacks of a huge cyberattack,” Jensen said, looking up to acknowledge her.

Lana nodded, glancing down long enough to see Shawn’s blood on her leg and a small red smear on her sleeveless shirt. It had never occurred to her to change — a perk of owning the shop. Jensen, on the other hand, was in one of his dark blue suits. He didn’t change colors often — the kind of guy who would always love a uniform, even one of his own making. He was a tightly wound thirty-seven-year-old Annapolis grad and veteran Navy cryptographer who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Why do you think it’s a cyberattack?” she asked him.

“I can’t access any DoD networks.” The Department of Defense had three primary communication systems that escalated in security. But Jensen generally had few problems accessing the first two — as did far less benevolent hackers.

“Are you saying DoD is down?” Lana asked.

“Like a dead dog,” Jensen responded. “And we’re getting reports of some bad stuff in the District. Your friends at NSA could probably tell us a lot.”

His eyes practically pushed Lana back out the door. Since she started CyberFortress, Lana’s firm had done critical contract work on governmental counter-cyberterror. In each instance, she and her colleagues at the NSA had concluded that the U.S. was the single most vulnerable nation in the world to cyberattack because it was the most Internet-dependent of all countries, while having few effective defenses to fend off cyberwarriors, including the ones who might live down the block. CF’s warnings — contained in a series of reports classified “top secret”—had been received with much approval by Congress and the White House, but little had actually been done to bolster the defense of the country’s most critical communication systems.

Lana told Jensen and several other top staffers who had gathered near her about the Amtrak and Norfolk Southern collision, including a quick summary of the heroics of the Baptist choir. “Has anyone heard anything about that train wreck?” she asked those assembled. “Emma’s home alone.”

Phillip, a stylishly attired computer nerd, as odd as that sounded, said he had just driven by the edge of the suburb and had seen no evidence of the fire on the Kressinger side of the rail line.

“If Emma’s home, she’s in about as safe a place as you can find around here now,” Jensen said.

“So what are you hearing anecdotally?” Lana asked, wondering how much worse the news could be.

“Sheila came in from the District this morning. Tell her,” Jensen said to his younger aide, a Princeton Ph.D. who had bristled at times to find herself working for the Navy vet. (“Grow up, girl,” Lana had told her. Jeff had earned his stripes, even if he had the overbearing personality of a career-driven technocrat.)

Sheila rested her hip on the side of a desk and nodded at Lana. “There was a bad subway collision near the Federal Triangle stop.” Close to the White House. “I saw huge amounts of smoke coming up into the street, and people were staggering up the stairs. But the first responders couldn’t even get close because the stoplights were out and there was no getting through all the jammed-up cars.”

“Let’s get you over to NSA,” Jensen said. “We’ll keep our eyes on things in Kressinger. Emma’s probably more worried about you.”

Emma wasn’t worried about her mom. Emma wasn’t worried about herself, or anything, except maybe suffering a boring day alone at home.

Seconds after her mom’s car turned the corner, Emma had run over to Payton’s house to hook up with her classmate for a morning of heavy petting and hickeys.

“Stop doing that,” Emma finally said, pointing to her upper neck. “My mom’s gonna freak out.”

“Okay, okay,” Payton replied, nodding numbly.

He returned to simply kissing Emma, at least for a few seconds. Then he started right back up again.

“Get off me.” She shoved him away, stood, smoothed down her striped skirt, and announced that she was leaving.

It was only as she stepped outside that she saw the smoke. Most of the sky had turned black. And the sirens were wailing left and right.

Emma pulled out her phone to check for messages, but of course it didn’t work.

Now she was scared. On instinct, she started running for home. And that’s when she got her first whiff of ammonia. It burned her lungs and eyes and nose, and stopped her short. The second whiff dropped her to her knees. The third doubled her over.

Emma keeled to the sidewalk, coughing convulsively.

Fort Meade sounded like a sanctuary as Lana dodged pockets of traffic in Bethesda before jumping on the Beltway. She found relatively few cars on the famed thoroughfare, but the warning light for her gas tank came on. A single expletive slipped past her lips; even in a Prius, that red light was unnerving. It sent stress straight to her shoulder blades, where she carried it like a Sherpa. She hadn’t seen a single open gas station. She also knew that if she found one, the line would be so long that she’d end up having to push the Prius to the pump.

She thought she had enough range to make it to the Army base, barring the unforeseen, though the morning was filling with the unexpected. Far more important, in the next few minutes she spotted commercial airliners heading toward both Reagan International and BWI, the Baltimore airport, which meant that if this was, indeed, a cyberattack, the aggressors had spared civilian airlines. Those big jets were fatally dependent on the Internet for information vital to safe flight. Their presence in the skies suggested that the attackers had a base level of civility and were not completely insane, though colliding trains and horrific fires proved hollow consolation. While airliners were landing, only fighter jets were taking off.

Kinetic war is not going to help, she said to herself as an F-15 streaked across the skyline. “Kinetic” was the designation that cybersecurity experts used for traditional warfare.

With great relief she pulled up to Fort Meade’s broad entrance, knowing that she would at least make it to the NSA. The guard stations resembled a big drive-through bank with a series of slots for mobile customers. The 9/11-sharpened procedures at the massive base were thorough but efficient, and within minutes she drove toward the arena-size parking lot that surrounded three sides of the agency’s enormous black building, one of more than fifty structures that made up the intelligence complex. All of it was secured by heavily armed guards, electrical fences, antitank barriers, and a full panoply of security cameras and motion detectors. That was what you could see. Copper hidden inside the walls and one-way windows kept electromagnetic signals from the prying eyes — and instruments — of the outside world. A white structure that resembled a sheet cake sat atop the largest building, the one to which Lana was headed.

She gave thought to throwing on her skirt and top in the car, but as soon as she shut off the Prius, the unrelenting summer heat started baking her.

The moment she entered NSA headquarters, security staff escorted her up to Deputy Director Robert Holmes’s office. His stout assistant, Donna Warnes, greeted her with a welcoming smile, an unspoken acknowledgment of Lana’s key role in vacuuming up a particularly nasty bug that had attacked the agency’s counterintelligence files three months ago. The bug wasn’t the only thing that had been nasty. She’d had to butt heads with several in-house forensic stars to get the job done — territorial disputes in the cybersphere — but she’d prevailed and had received a commendation from Holmes himself.

Donna led Lana into her boss’s large conference room, where he’d gathered five members of his top team at the end of a long table. Lana wasn’t the only one in mufti; Ronald Wilkes, who oversaw much of the agency’s liaison with congressional intelligence committees, was still in his tennis whites, which matched the color of his hair.

His blue eyes were all over her, moving from the blood on her long legs to the dabs on her cheeks, making the most of any excuse to gaze at her. He’d told her several times that he thought she was beautiful, loved her “jet black hair,” “great cheekbones,” “bee-stung lips.” Lana considered it fortunate for the country that his work for NSA was more creative than his comments about her body.

Holmes, always the old-school gentleman, gave no obvious notice of Lana’s gritty appearance. Unlike so many power brokers in Washington, the deputy director assumed the best about the people he surrounded himself with. If Lana Elkins had smoke smudges on her arms and blood on her leg and face, then she had her reasons. He confirmed his confidence in her in the next few seconds with an offhanded acknowledgment of her unusual condition.

“I think our trusted consultant here has already been fighting the good fight. Donna, please bring her water, coffee, and a damp cloth.”

“It was bad out in Kressinger,” Lana said. She explained what had happened to the Amtrak and freight trains.

“We heard about that,” Holmes said. “Rail switches and signals have stopped working everywhere.”

“Do you know if the fire has spread into Kressinger? I’m worried about my daughter.”

“No, but an ammonia tanker exploded, and they’re trying to evacuate everyone within about a mile of the track,” Holmes replied.

“Jesus, that might include us.”

“They’re letting people know. Is your daughter inside your house, windows closed?”

“Yes,” Lana said, with only a little confidence regarding Emma’s whereabouts.

“She should be okay, then. And if you’re too close, they’ll evacuate her,” Holmes added. “I wish our response to every crisis in the country was unfolding that smoothly. What else do you know about the overall situation at this point? Have you been at CF?”

“Yes. I understand the Web is down, and Jeff Jensen said the military networks have failed.”

“That is correct. We’re getting our information piecemeal, and it’s worse over at DoD.” He shook his head. “Go ahead, tell her,” Holmes said to Joshua Tenon, a more immediate contemporary of Lana’s.

Tenon tugged nervously on a salt-and-pepper beard that hid his recessed chin and gave her a quick nod. “The Eastern and Western Interconnects are down.” The two big grids that covered the U.S. “Texas is down, too.” The Lone Star State had its own grid. “So all of the U.S. has lost power, along with parts of Canada and northern Mexico.”

That made sense to Lana: The power links among the North American nations did not have a strict respect for borders.

Donna set coffee, water, and a facecloth on the table for her. Lana wiped away the blood on her leg. Holmes pointed to her cheek, and she cleaned that off, too, as Tenon went on:

“China cut itself off from the rest of the world immediately, and has suffered very little damage, if any. All of their electric and rail systems have switched to non-networked control systems, and they’re using backup radio.”

In the parlance of the spy trade, China had “pulled up the drawbridge.” China could do that because it was a far less open society than the U.S. Moreover, from a cybersecurity standpoint, it was notably ahead of much of the world, so it could cut itself off from the Web.

“But what’s interesting,” Tenon said, “is that China might not have even been targeted. Russia, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East are hardly affected at all, compared to us.”

Lana nodded. “And I saw commercial aircraft.”

“That’s right,” Tenon replied. “That unwritten rule has not been violated.”

“What about banks?” she asked. Another unwritten rule. The U.S., for instance, never launched a cyberattack on Iraqi banks during its wars, though the U.S. had the capacity to ruin that country’s financial system.

“There’s no sign yet that the banking community is subject to a direct attack. Of course, they can’t operate without the Web.”

“But we’re not seeing the wholesale destruction of bank records?” Let’s cut to the chase, she thought.

“No, but again, we should add a big ‘yet’ to any assessment of that nature,” Tenon replied.

Holmes leaned forward. “But there’s plenty of bad news, because a lot of other systems have failed. We have train wrecks in more than fifty locations, including downtown Chicago and Los Angeles, pipeline explosions in Michigan and Wisconsin, and there are reports of chemical plants in New Jersey releasing massive amounts of chlorine.” Another deadly gas. “We’ve got miners stuck underground, and people stuck in elevators.” He shook his head. “And without power, evacuation is a nightmare in most of those places. There’s more.” Holmes nodded at Teresa McGivern, a veteran NSA analyst. “Show Lana what we’re seeing on our own network.”

McGivern, spry and nearing retirement, clicked the keyboard on her computer, and a flat screen came alive on the wall across from Lana. A huge fire bloomed as orange as a California poppy field.

“That’s a gas pipeline right outside Atlanta,” McGivern said. “It could turn into a firestorm, and it’s definitely heading toward my hometown.” The analyst lent a trace of her Southern roots to her voice. “And this”—she clicked her computer keys—“is the Miami harbor. Those are cruise ships, though you’d never know by looking.”

No, you wouldn’t, thought Lana. She’d used that terminal on her honeymoon, and now it was burning down, just like her marriage had when Emma was two years old and Lana finally realized that she had more than one toddler in the house. Three massive vessels were on fire, sending up smoke plumes the size of skyscrapers.

“We suspect that logic bombs were placed in the ships’ computer systems to overload the electrical circuits.” Logic bombs could lie in wait in a computer network until signaled. Then, after overloading electrical circuits, for instance, a logic bomb could erase all data that might make its presence known or even traceable.

“Were the ships full?” Lana asked.

“To capacity. And all the sprinklers and smoke alarms were disabled.” McGivern spoke without emotion. She’d been at NSA for decades and had seen a world of horrors. But Lana’s insides were twisting tight as hawsers.

“This is another pipeline explosion,” McGivern said. “It’s near Denver, but as you can see, it’s already moving through national forest land. It’s possible that it will turn into the state’s biggest wildfire ever, because heavy winds are expected for the next week and there’s not a drop of rain on the horizon.”

“Do we know how many fatalities we’ve got nationwide?” Lana asked Holmes, knowing he would be slated to make any comments about that sensitive issue. The extent of casualties was not in Lana’s purview, narrowly speaking, but after looking at pipeline explosions and those incinerated cruise ships, she had to ask.

“Minimally, just this morning? Tens of thousands would be a conservative guess,” Holmes replied. “That’s what we’re releasing to the media, the few who actually made it to our door to get answers. But in truth? We could easily be looking at more than a hundred thousand fatalities. This makes 9/11 look like a piker’s picnic.” Holmes cleared his throat, and his gaze took in each of them. “We’re at war.”

Hearing that from a man as serious as Holmes sent a chill straight to Lana’s core. For the first time in her life, real war had overtaken most of her country. Not with bombs or bullets or missiles, but with software written by anonymous hands and delivered in stealth and silence. Cowards with codes. She couldn’t wait to lock on to them in the cybersphere.

Whoever the hell they are.

“What galls me most,” Holmes said, as if reading her mind, “is that we don’t even know who’s attacking us.” He pointed to the screen. “But we’re sure seeing what they’re capable of.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been two hours, and our homeland has already suffered more overall damage than in all its previous wars combined.”

What was notable, Lana thought, was that neither Holmes nor anyone else at the table was rushing to speculate about the perpetrators of the attack, though numerous suspects came immediately to her mind and, undoubtedly, to theirs as well.

“It’s going to get worse,” Tenon added with another nervous tug on his beard.

That wasn’t news in nearby Washington, D.C. Smoke was already drifting over the White House.