Lethal Code

CHAPTER 5

Last night had been harrowing for Ruhi and Candace. It didn’t start off that way, at least after the Afghan War vet had cleared out the last of the mob that had tried to break down her door and shoot its way into her room. She’d also found a couple of drunken teenage boys lingering in the lobby. They ran off the instant she waved them out of the building with her gun.

Candace had accepted Ruhi’s offer of his apartment, packing up her belongings quickly; her greatly damaged door wouldn’t keep out anyone. But before he could even wonder whether his appeal extended beyond a convenient couch, she told him not to get any big ideas.

“I just don’t want to be traveling anywhere right now.”

He watched her secure his apartment by checking the closets and even under his bed, nodding approvingly when she saw that the first-floor windows were a good eight feet off the ground — a benefit of an old building. Then the two of them moved a heavy bureau from his bedroom to the front door, which they backed up with a gorgeous silk heirloom couch that had been shipped to him all the way from Riyadh. It pained Ruhi to think of it getting shot up. But better it than me, he said to himself quickly.

When he made a stab at gallantry by saying, “Of course, I’ll take the couch and you can have the privacy of my bedroom,” she shook her head.

“No. I’m the first line of defense. Unless you’re holding out on me and have extensive firearms training for close-quarters combat. Otherwise, I should be on the couch. Besides,” she added with a winning smile, “I’m a light sleeper. Remember that.”

Not that sleep was on the horizon anytime soon.

The neighborhood remained calm for about another hour. Then gunshots erupted down the street. The burst ended quickly, but shots continued to startle them sporadically well into the evening. Never right in front of the old townhome, but close enough to make them wary of errant bullets — and grateful for the brick exterior.

As twilight thickened, they used no emergency lights or candles, keeping the apartment dark and watching through the blinds. They observed crowds of mostly young men moving down the street, weaving in and around parked cars, smashing windows and stealing everything within reach.

By midnight, the heat in the apartment grew stifling. Without power, they had no air movement. Ruhi improvised fans from the lid of a cardboard box, but that was the best he could come up with. He suggested opening a window. “We’re right here. No one’s going to get in.” But “Homeland Security,” as he’d privately dubbed Candace, wouldn’t hear of it.

By twelve thirty, though, even she couldn’t take the steaming conditions. They opened the window in his dark living room and raised the shade, then dragged a plush love seat over to it. She rested her gun in her lap as soon as she sat down, pointing to an orange glow in the night sky. The fire looked about a mile or two away.

“At least it’s not the Capitol now,” she said. “That looks like it’s over by the Cultural Center.” Georgetown. Distant gunfire erupted a second later.

“I thought Americans were supposed to pull together at times like this,” Ruhi said as he walked back to the bathroom, returning moments later with two damp, cool washcloths. “Look at 9/11,” he added, handing one of them to her and claiming the other half of the love seat.

She thanked him and wiped her face. “We still had power on 9/11. People weren’t sitting around in the dark, or trying to take advantage of it. They weren’t directly affected.”

“Where were you back then?” he asked.

“Ninth grade in good old Bloomington, Indiana, already thinking about going to IU to be a social worker.”

“You’re kidding. Sorry, Candace, but you just don’t strike me as a caseworker, counselor type of woman.”

“I wasn’t for long, because 9/11 changed all that. I was so angry I started thinking right away about joining the military. I started ROTC a few years later at IU, and then it was off to basic training and ‘Hello, Afghanistan.’” She smiled. He loved the way it lit up her whole face, even in the dim light. “Where were you?”

“University of Vermont,” he replied. “Environmental studies. 9/11 didn’t have that kind of impact on me.”

She wiped her neck with the wet cloth, always keeping an eye on the open window when she talked. “I never could get how people weren’t stunned by those attacks. But for a lot of them — I guess you, too — it wasn’t such a big deal.”

“I’m not saying that,” he responded quickly. “It’s just that I might have seen it differently, being born in Saudi Arabia. That kind of anger toward the U.S. didn’t surprise me.”

“I didn’t know you were born there.”

“Why would you?” he asked.

“I guess no reason,” she said.

“Thirty-four years ago, right in Riyadh.”

“So did you think 9/11 was justified? What they did?”

“Absolutely not.” He felt like he was being grilled by the customs officer who “welcomed” him back to the U.S. the last time he’d visited Riyadh and several other major cities in the Middle East and South Asia. “Are you kidding? And it was painful to find out that a bunch of Saudis carried out the attacks. So, no, I didn’t think anything justified it. But it was a huge mistake for U.S. intelligence to have missed all the static out there. And then the country made a mistake of historical proportions by invading Iraq.”

“What about Afghanistan?”

Talk about being put on the spot. Ruhi opted for honesty: “That didn’t work out so well, either.”

She took a deep breath. He sensed she was about to explode, but she breathed out slowly and surprised him, saying, “No, it didn’t. Sometimes I can’t even stand to think about the buddies I lost over there, or the ones still in Walter Reed.” She looked at him. “Were you angry at the U.S.?”

“No — do I look like an angry guy to you?” He watched her closely as she turned back to the window. Her feet were up on the sill. He didn’t mind her questions. In fact, he was flattered, because he thought there was a good chance she was asking them to figure out whether they could possibly be compatible. He didn’t have a political litmus test for a potential mate. Life was too short for that.

Candace shook her head, but kept her eyes trained on the street. “No, I’d have to say that you don’t seem like an angry guy to me. I was around a lot of them in the service, so I know what they’re like. Not much fun. I have a simple policy about angry guys: Avoid them.”

He let the silence settle between them. And then their eyes met. Kiss her, he thought at once. The stillness held for another second. He was about to lean forward when she looked away. He almost groaned, then reminded himself that she’d at least shown interest in his background and his thoughts about her country. He still had trouble thinking of it as his nation, despite his citizenship.

Candace sat on the edge of the love seat, scanning the street. “So who do you think did it? As long as we really can rule out aliens.” Deadpan with that last comment.

Ruhi lifted his feet to the windowsill and leaned back. “I know the grid end of things, and I’ve read some articles about cyberwarfare, stuff in the Post and Times, but that’s about it. I’m sure you know a whole lot more about it than I do.”

He was going to have wait to find out if she actually did because right then — and directly outside his door — they heard what sounded like a dozen young men pounding up the stairs, opening fire seconds later on the second floor.

Candace was already down behind the love seat. Ruhi joined her right away.

“Four weapons,” she whispered. “Handguns.”

“You can really tell?”

“Of course.”

“Sounds like they’re back for blood,” he said, realizing that those words had never before crossed his lips, not with any seriousness, anyway.

Candace scrambled over to the couch, keeping her head below the top of the bureau, listening carefully. Ruhi crawled up beside her, arriving just as a gunshot went off close by. It sounded like it could have come from right outside his door. He wondered if the guys out there had stopped long enough to read the names on the mailboxes — and if they were worldly enough to know that Mancur could belong to the “raghead.”

“Being this close is not a good idea,” she said softly. “We’d better back up.”

He followed her behind a breakfast bar that set off the kitchen from the larger living area. More footsteps issued from the stairs.

“Do you think they’re still going up?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I hope Mrs. Miranda doesn’t come out of her apartment,” Ruhi said, nodding toward the wall that he shared with his elderly neighbor.

“Does she leave her hearing aids in at night?”

“I have no idea. She likes to wander out when she hears things. I think she’s lonely.”

“Oh, Christ,” Candace said, “that’s scary. If I hear them taking down her door, I’m going to have to be able to get out there.” She nodded at the furniture blocking his door.

And do what? Probably more of what Ruhi had seen up in her apartment.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said, feeling wholly ineffective.

“Just stay down,” she replied, “till I say different.”

“I can handle that. What do we do if they try to burn the place down?” It didn’t seem like a remote possibility, given the orange glow in the night sky.

“That would be the biggest mistake any of them would ever make.” As if by reflex, Candace checked her load.

Even now she didn’t appear anxious. Calculating, yes. Alert, absolutely. But not at all fidgety, while he thought he had enough nerves for a roomful of insomniacs. His jumpiness had him flinching when they heard loud crashing noises on the stairs.

“Sounds like your furniture is dying,” Ruhi said.

“It’s not actually mine,” she replied. “Mine’s not showing up for a few weeks. I had to ship it from Indiana. It’s the landlord’s. He said he was happy to loan it to a vet. I’ll bet that’s the last time that happens. I hope he’s covered.”

Me, too, thought Ruhi, or the rent’s going up. The guy was tighter than a tourniquet.

The distinct sound of breaking glass quickly followed.

“The mirror,” Candace said calmly.

Then footfalls came heavily down the stairs. In seconds, the two of them heard pounding on Mrs. Miranda’s door.

“Don’t open it,” Ruhi and Candace both implored quietly at the same time.

“Is she always there?” Candace asked right away. “Does she have family she might be staying with because of the outage?”

“I haven’t seen anyone since her husband died last year.”

The pounding on Mrs. Miranda’s door ceased. But Ruhi flinched again when the thugs beat on his door.

“Open up.”

“Yell ‘Go away,’” Candace whispered. “They hear a woman, it’s going to get worse.”

“Go away,” Ruhi shouted, deepening his voice and glad he sounded as American as the next guy.

“Open up or we’re coming in, you fucking raghead.”

“Tell them you’re not some ‘fucking raghead’ and that you’re armed and you’ll shoot.”

Ruhi did as directed.

Three bullets blasted through the door in response. The last sounded duller than the first two and must have hit the dresser. He wished they’d put the back of the bureau to the door — and hoped his couch had been spared.

Candace aimed and fired twice, but high, as she had initially in her apartment.

“I don’t want to hit anyone right now,” she said to him. “It’ll just escalate if I do. I’m hoping they’ll go look for low-hanging fruit and leave the building. I can’t imagine they want a real firefight.”

They didn’t, evidently. They moved on without another shot. But from then on, all through the night, either Ruhi or Candace kept watch in two-hour shifts. She always kept the gun, even when she napped a foot away on the couch, assuring him that she was never more than a blink from battle.

By morning the streets of Georgetown were quiet and largely empty. When they gazed out the window together, both bleary-eyed, they saw only rubbish, and a burn barrel halfway down the block sending up dark plumes that joined other smoke drifting over the District.

But as far as they could see, there were few signs of devastating destruction. And no bodies.

Ruhi provided a breakfast of dry cereal and tepid milk. He’d kept the refrigerator closed since yesterday morning.

Both of them were ruing the absence of coffee when the electricity returned, startling them with sudden light from above and air-conditioner racket.

“Get that java jumping,” Candace urged without missing a beat. “I’m going to shower, if that’s okay with you.”

“Of course.”

She took her gun and locked the door. Ruhi ground the beans and put on the water.

He was examining the bullet holes in the top half of his front door when he thought to put his kitchen radio on. Nothing. All the stations were still off the air.

Candace stepped out in a fresh change of clothes. Wet hair. No makeup. Ruhi thought she looked fabulous.

“I’ve got to get over to the Capitol,” she said. “But I’ll be back tonight, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, but wouldn’t you be safer somewhere else? They’re hunting for you.”

“Not just me, Ruhi, and I can’t leave you high and dry.” She helped herself to half a cup of the brew. “I don’t want to,” she added in a soft voice that he hadn’t heard till now.

“Then stay, by all means,” Ruhi said, doing his best not to overwhelm her by sounding too ebullient. He dug around in a kitchen drawer and handed her a spare key.

“Thanks.”

They started moving the couch away from the door when a smooth, comforting voice came on the radio:

“I used to live in your country. It was in Detroit, not so long ago…”

They both walked across the living room, listening closely. In moments, they turned to each other in alarm.

Emma was not pleased. Sure, she understood that her mother needed to go fight the war on terror, or something like that. But the power was back on, so how bad could it be? But that’s not what really pissed her off. She was actually feeling pretty good about her mom, even holding her hand in the car. That was kind of nice. But all those warm feelings ended a few minutes ago when Lana said that Mrs. Johansson was coming over to take care of her.

“I’m too old for a babysitter,” Emma seethed, even though it hurt her throat to argue. If it hadn’t been so painful, she would have made an even louder case. That’s how irate she felt when she heard that Johansson the Jabberer was coming over to make sure Emma got her meds on time.

“She’s not really a babysitter,” Lana said. “She’s more like a caregiver.”

“I don’t care what you call her, she’s a babysitter!”

Oh, that hurt her throat. Emma gripped her neck, making sure her mother noticed how much she was sacrificing to make her point.

But it was true. Plus, Johansson hogged all the fun food. Potato chips, ice cream, you name it. All of it disappeared when Johansson came around. Gone. Poof.

“You’re on meds, darling,” Lana said, “so stop fretting and stay ahead of the pain. I can’t leave you home alone. You’ve got your phone, so get in touch with your friends. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, and there’s some service now.”

Of course, if her dad hadn’t disappeared on them, she wouldn’t have to put up with “caregivers” at all. She forced herself, as she had many times before, to stop thinking about him. She already had plenty of pain with her throat, which felt like it was on fire. Argh. And here came Johansson, moving slowly up the front walk.

Her mom rushed out to greet Mrs. Johansson, gave Emma a quick hug, then hurried back out to her car.

Can’t get away fast enough, can you, Mom? Sure makes a girl feel loved.

But Emma knew she was being unfair — to her mom. Johansson was another story.

Emma hand-signaled Mrs. J immediately that she was going back to her room.

“Don’t lock the door,” her mom’s “friend” said. “You have your medicine to take.” Pronounced med-a-sin. It curdled Emma’s ears just to hear her say the word.

At least Emma had the phone. That was a relief. She checked her messages and could have screamed. Really and truly, raw throat or not. Skateboarder Boy must have gotten her number from someone, because he’d sent her a text, and there she was with all her Dora the Explorer glory on full display. His message SUCKED: C ME OR EVERYBODY WILL C U.

Emma didn’t know which was worse: the indignity of wearing those joke panties that weren’t so funny anymore, or lying like a slab of meat on a gurney with her skirt up over her hips. She wished it had been over her head.

She groaned and beat the bed with her first. She just knew that he’d already sent it all over the Internet. “Asshole!”

“Don’t talk like that,” Mrs. J said, standing over her shoulder with a glass of water and the pill bottle.

Emma looked up, then hid the phone against her chest. Too late.

“Are you sexting a boy? Give me that.”

Mrs. J put aside the pills and water and made an aggressive grab for the phone. Sedated or not, Emma rolled away, kicking wildly. Johansson wasn’t so easily daunted, though, and tried to shove Emma’s legs out of the way.

“I’m telling,” Emma tried to yell. She hit me, Mom. She did. Hard.

“You go right ahead. I want to hear what your mother has to say about all this.”

And Johansson kept coming, grabbing her arms. Geez, that hurt. And she was yelling, “Give me that phone. Give it to me!”

Now Emma panicked. Johansson had to have at least a hundred pounds on her, and she was coming in fast. Emma kicked frantically.

Uh-oh. She caught the babysitter right in the belly.

Mrs. J keeled, but got both feet under her. She staggered toward the door, groaning.

Emma felt horrible. She hadn’t kicked anyone since she was really little. But as soon as Mrs. J moved into the hallway, Emma eased the door shut and locked it.

She was actually relieved when Mrs. J had enough breath to say, “You are an evil child.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered, her voice almost gone.

Johansson rattled the handle. The lock held. Emma listened to Mrs. J plod away, and then threw herself on the bed, feeling miserable. She looked at the photo of her and her panties and felt even worse. But then she studied it closely. It was really kind of flattering, wasn’t it? Her face looked great, not like she was in pain, more like she’d found inner bliss. Like a saint. St. Emma.

It might have been shock that she was seeing on her face, but Emma didn’t care. I look great. And you can’t really see anything.

As for wearing little-girl underwear to high school, she’d play it cool, be ironic: Yeah, I wear them all the time. “Dora the Explorer” panties? Don’t you get it?

So… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Skateboarder Boy posted the photo.

She texted him back: I’M CALLING YOUR BLUFF. DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO. BUT I’LL C U ANYWAY.

Lana put on her headset and rang Jeff Jensen, her VP at CyberFortress, before she backed out of her garage. After he’d checked the company’s computer system, he’d texted her saying they needed to talk.

“I’m here,” Lana said when he picked up the line she had reserved for only her calls to him.

“I found APTs.”

Nothing like posting the headline right away, Lana thought. APTs were “advanced persistent threats,” virulent bugs generally Chinese in origin. “How bad?” She drove impatiently through the outskirts of Bethesda.

“Bad. They’d set up shop some time ago, though. We’re talking at least a few months.”

“And we’re just finding them?” Lana sounded annoyed — for good reason: She was.

“These are very slick,” Jensen replied.

“What were they going after?” She spoke about the APTs as if they possessed volition of their own. Easy to see why: They were canny enough to extract data and leave. Sweet — if you weren’t being pillaged.

“I don’t know what they wanted, and I don’t think we ever will. For all we know, most might have already returned to the mother ship. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Defense Department secrets. The takeaway here is that they came well before the attack on the grid.”

“So you’re pulling the weeds?” she asked him, meaning extracting the APTs.

“I’ve started on it.”

“Use as much of the workforce as you need. We want them out of there ASAP.” Not telling him anything he didn’t know, but adding urgency to whatever sense of purpose he might already have felt.

Lana was now making great time on the Beltway, which at this point in her life had become more familiar to her than her own backyard.

“This puts us in company with Cisco and lots of others,” Jeff said, perhaps to contextualize the violation of the system whose security was his domain.

Lana agreed. Cisco was just one of the many marquee names of western technology companies that had been targeted by Chinese hackers. In one of their biggest coups they stole Cisco’s innovative router, a device that forwarded packets of data to parts of a network system.

“Their fingerprints are showing up everywhere,” Jeff said, “so they were bound to target us sooner or later.”

“The point is they have fingerprints.”

Which had also been found on defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s own highly classified government work. The Chinese had even been brazen enough to copy information right off the Secretary of Commerce’s laptop when he was in Beijing. That attack had been dubbed “Titan Rain.” More like a monsoon when it was over, because the data from the secretary’s laptop was used to gain access to Commerce Department computers, which proved vital to the exfiltration of upward of twenty trillion bytes of data from the Pentagon’s unclassified network.

“So let me know if those prints show up at NSA or anywhere else,” Jeff said.

“You’re covered,” she told him. “Now go play exterminator with those bugs.”

Twenty minutes after she hung up — while charging across the vast NSA parking lot — she received a furious call from Irene Johansson vowing that she would never, “under any circumstances,” watch Emma again. Then she informed Lana that her daughter had kicked her in the stomach after she’d caught her sexting “filthy pictures.”

“What?” Lana exclaimed, still rushing toward the monolithic headquarters, struck almost numb by the fact that she was having to deal with this kind of total crap while the fate of the country was up for grabs. She tried desperately to think of a way to ameliorate the situation between the two antagonists. She knew Emma was unhappy about having Mrs. Johansson at the house, but kicking? And sexting?

“Yes, both,” Irene bellowed. “She kicked me because I caught her red-handed with her dirty little pictures on the phone. I saw them.”

“Of her?”

“Yes, she had her dress pulled all the way up. She was showing off her undies. The Dora the Explorer ones. I’ve seen them under her bed for months.”

At least she wasn’t naked. But “sexting” a picture of herself in Dora the Explorer underpants? Unless there was something super-kinky going on that Lana simply couldn’t fathom, that didn’t make any sense. Dora the Explorer and sexting sounded like an oxymoron — not that she wanted Emma having her panty pictures on the Web.

“So is she still in her bedroom?”

“I don’t know. I’m at home.”

“Oh, please, don’t do this to us, Irene,” Lana said as she paused before undergoing newly fortified security at the agency entrance.

“Good-bye,” Irene said. “You have raised a bad girl.”

Lana stared at her phone, shaking her head, then speed-dialed Emma. “Are you all right?” she asked immediately.

“Yes, but—”

“Stop! Don’t say another word. Can I possibly trust you to take your medicine on time and stay home with the doors locked?”

“Of course, Mom,” Emma said in a hoarse voice. “Why would you think—”

“Because you’re in this mess because you didn’t do that yesterday.”

“Oh. Right. Yes.”

“Do it. Stay ahead of the pain. I’ll be home as soon as I can. I love you. Now good-bye.”

Lana handed over her phone, briefcase with laptop — everything — to hard-eyed security agents. After undergoing an intense screening, she headed up to Deputy Director Holmes’s office.

Donna Warnes, his efficient executive assistant, directed her to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. SCIFs — pronounced “skiffs”—were large secure rooms that prevented all electronic surveillance while eliminating the threat of any data leakage.

But before entering, Lana had to check her laptop and personal items with blank-faced security personnel. She also had to be “read in” by an official who announced that the world would crash down around her shoulders if she ever breathed a word of what she was about to learn.

“Do you understand?” he asked her.

“Got it.”

But it wasn’t over. “Sign this,” he ordered, handing her a form that acknowledged that she had been fully briefed and understood the strict nature of the security demands.

It wasn’t Lana’s first time in a SCIF, not by a long shot. But each time she entered one she was taken aback by the absence of windows and the appearance of utter impregnability that came from being encased in masonry. The room also came equipped with motion detectors in the corners of the ceiling to catch anyone entering the facility during off-hours.

Lana took a seat about halfway around a large conference table. Holmes thanked her somberly for coming, adding, “We’ve just started reviewing the damage. We have our internal communications up, so after a quick look at the toll, we’ll turn our attention to our list of suspects, which I trust you’ll help us with.”

“I heard the ‘commentary.’” She made air quotes with her intonation. “Any accuracy to the claim of fifty thousand dead?”

Holmes nodded, raking his white hair. “It might even be worse, but we’re not confirming anything right now. A huge problem at the moment is the wide-scale looting and rioting. It’s taking place in more than a hundred cities and suburban areas. That number could be greater, too, but our reporting is still terribly hampered. The social upheaval is exactly what the enemy was planning on, we think. By putting the power back on, and then threatening to cut it off any second without warning, they set off waves of panic. The Army and National Guard are deployed virtually everywhere.”

Holmes used a remote to bring a large flat screen to life against the solid white wall. “So let’s look at all the suspects now — nations, rogue players, terrorists, and our own domestic enemies.”

The screen showed a list of nations along with a multicolored globe. “There’s no consensus on a culprit; let me say that at the outset. But if we can winnow the wheat from the chaff at this stage, we can focus our efforts more efficiently.”

Holmes was speaking to a full table, including the NSA officials Lana had sat with just yesterday. Ronald Wilkes, last seen by her in his tennis whites, now sported a dark suit that managed to look neatly pressed after his all-nighter at the Capitol; he had been liaising with congressional intelligence committees. With a declaration of war in the offing, Wilkes was probably taking furious heat from senators and congressmen eager for an identifiable enemy to crush.

Joshua Tenon, of the salt-and-pepper beard, sat directly across from her. His expertise on international energy matters had justified his presence at almost every meeting Lana had ever attended at NSA.

Next to Lana, veteran policy analyst Teresa McGivern worked her laptop with one hand, a skill that Lana had never seen executed with such élan. McGivern would not be retiring anytime soon, no matter her plans of little more than thirty hours ago.

The gray-haired McGivern had an assistant, a younger handsome man whose name escaped Lana, much to her chagrin. NSA was not a name tag kind of place.

“I’d like to dispose with the ‘red meat’ first,” Holmes said, a blunt acknowledgment that many pundits and so-called opinion makers would be screaming for retaliation against the country’s traditional foes, even if that mind-set harked back to a Cold War era already eclipsed by far more wrenching events.

Just as dangerous, Lana thought, was a reflexive bellicosity toward certain nations in the Middle East.

“If we’re in housekeeping mode,” McGivern said, “I think it’s incumbent upon us to put aside any notions of Chinese responsibility.” Tenon moved to speak, but she put up her hand to quiet him. “Yes, I know they drew up the drawbridge right away, but seriously, what else would we expect them to do? If we had that kind of capability over all the computer systems in this country, we would pull the damn drawbridge up, too. We’d do it preemptively to protect ourselves from the fallout. That’s all the Chinese did. Furthermore, they’re not going to destroy an economy on which they are highly dependent for their own domestic stability, and they’re not going to destroy a currency when they own a trillion dollars of it. I can’t imagine what the exchange rate is going to be on the U.S. dollar, but the Chinese are going to get clobbered on their dollar holdings. No, they did not cut off their nose to spite their face.”

Spoken with the crisp eloquence for which McGivern was long regarded. Her last comment might even have elicited a chuckle or two at any other time. But this was war, declared or not.

“But what about ‘GhostNet’?” Lana asked pointedly. “Look at what they were caught doing with that operation.”

She respected McGivern, but Canadian intelligence had found that the Chinese had taken over 1,300 computers in the embassies of a number of countries worldwide, including their own and the U.S.’s. What was extraordinary was the engineering that allowed Chinese hackers to remotely turn on cameras and microphones in the hardware of those computers without signaling those actions to the actual users. Then the hackers had the images and sound sent back to servers in China. The targets of GhostNet were offices working with nongovernmental organizations dealing with Tibet.

Lana wasn’t through: “The same year — and this is what’s so directly relevant — we know that Chinese hackers penetrated the U.S. power grid and left behind tools that could have brought it down.”

“Those were cleared out,” Tenon said, pulling on his beard. Nervous habit.

“Yes, and maybe newer and more sophisticated versions took their place and then took down the country,” Lana volleyed. “Look at how much China could benefit if we pulled out of the Pacific theater.”

“It’s a given,” McGivern retorted, “that they would have tried to penetrate our grid with better devices, and that they would benefit if we were foolish enough to withdraw from our bases. But it still doesn’t explain why they would so profoundly harm their own interests. And let me remind everyone that the penetration of our grid was all about keeping us on the sidelines in their squabble over the Spratlys.”

Numerous small islands lay between Vietnam and the Philippines, some of which were claimed by both of those countries and China, as well as other nations. The region of the South China Sea contained the world’s fourth-largest natural gas deposits; a critical trade route from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, through which most of the world’s oil was shipped; and also some of the largest stocks of fish left on Earth.

McGivern was stating that the Chinese grid penetrations were a subtle means of blackmailing the U.S. into standing aside as China had its big beef with Vietnam and the Philippines.

“The Chinese even hacked President Obama’s campaign material,” Ronald Wilkes chimed in, “so maybe taking them off the table isn’t such a good idea. Ideology can trump economic concerns.”

“Speaking of ideological blindness, just look at North Korea,” a grizzled analyst said, at about two o’clock from where Lana sat. “Is it mere coincidence that they hacked those classified hazardous chemical sites, and now we’re seeing chlorine releases in New Jersey and Pennsylvania?”

“I sincerely hope it’s not the North Koreans,” Holmes said to nods around the table. Everyone in the SCIF understood that if the trail led to the North Koreans, a huge kinetic response was all but inevitable. Such an attack would almost certainly result in the North Koreans unleashing thousands of rockets that they had trained on Seoul, obliterating the city and most of its ten million inhabitants. That, in turn, would surely set off a new Korean war — or a new chapter of the old one, in the view of many Asia experts — no doubt bringing the Chinese back into the conflict. The dominoes clacked almost audibly in the minds of everyone present.

“Let’s not disregard China, but let’s look at Russia, another traditional… rival,” Holmes said diplomatically.

“They’re perfectly capable of doing this to us,” Lana volunteered.

“They certainly are,” McGivern echoed.

Russia’s FSB, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, might even be NSA’s equal. The Russians ran what NSA officials conceded was one of the best hacker schools in the world. Its graduates had left their own cybertrail across U.S. intelligence. NSA had hounded the Russian hackers closely — sometimes, alas, only after the horse was out of the barn.

“SIPRNet, anyone?” the young male aide to McGivern asked.

Others, including Lana, groaned at the allusion to Russian penetration of the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, a U.S. Defense Department and State Department interconnected computer network for classified information. Russian hackers had engineered spyware that was downloaded onto thumb drives, unbeknownst, of course, to their users. Once those drives were inserted into SIPRNet computers, the security of the entire system was greatly compromised. Within hours, the Russians had infected thousands of high-level and supposedly secret U.S. military computers in a number of nations, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

“So we know the Russians have superb abilities,” Lana went on, “and we know they try to cover up their hacking any way they can.”

She was referring to the country’s extensive history of attempting to disguise its hacking by claiming the cyberassaults that originated on its soil were done by “patriotic citizens” who supposedly carried out the highly sophisticated and coordinated attacks on their own. Patent nonsense.

Those “citizens,” usually on the payroll of the Russian security agencies, were known to have launched “distributed denial of service attacks,” DDoS, on a number of former Soviet-era republics that had proved too feisty for their minders in Moscow. DDoS attacks overloaded servers in those countries, which denied service to their users, or slowed down the services so severely that they became, for all intents and purposes, nonfunctional.

“Who else has the capability to attack us like this?” Holmes asked. “Friend, foe — let’s get it all on the table quickly. There can always be a rogue player in an agency friendly to us.”

As others responded with a dauntingly long list that included Taiwan, Iran, Australia, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and several NATO countries, Lana was struck by the underlying assumption of Holmes’s question: that the U.S. was so vulnerable to cyberattack that it was necessary to compile a lengthy list of suspects, some of which were two-bit players — at best — on the international scene.

But the success of the attack on the U.S. lay unquestionably, in Lana’s view, in the criminal lack of the country’s preparedness. There were several long-festering reasons for that vulnerability.

For starters, America was far more dependent upon privately owned computer systems than were any potential enemies. Those private U.S. networks held extensive control of vital national interests, everything from electric power to banks, pipelines to airlines, even the numerous private contractors that provided critical support services to the Department of Defense.

Washington had long expected those private concerns to protect their systems. Clearly, they had failed. But as former presidential adviser Richard A. Clarke had noted, telling those companies to protect themselves was like telling American corporations at the beginning of the nuclear age to buy their own bombs.

Clarke had long maintained that the political power of those private companies was so great that they routinely blocked the development or implementation of many government regulations that could have protected them — and the country — from a devastating cyberattack, like the one America had just suffered. Short-term profit concerns trumped long-term security demands with numbing regularity.

Most alarming to Lana was the unnerving understanding that even if the military’s own networks were secure — and recent history had demolished that delusion — the networks of its contractors had proved unreliable. The complicated case of Edward Snowden spoke clearly to that. The easy mining of those private networks placed an additional — and in her opinion, unwarranted — risk on the nation’s defenders.

The U.S. also suffered from an inverse relationship between its computer power and its vulnerability. A developing country, far less dependent on computers and the Internet, could launch a cyberattack on the U.S., knowing that it was risking far less in computer resources than its wealthy target. Ironically enough, that left the poorer country getting much more bang for the buck.

As discussion of both putative allies and known enemies trailed off, Holmes said he wanted to talk about rogue elements.

“The Internet is filled with them,” McGivern said. “It’s the Waziristan of cyberspace.”

Muslim terrorists were mentioned by name, their faces flashing on the same screen that had listed suspect nations earlier. Lana had been in enough of these sessions with Holmes to sense his impatience and know that he wanted to move the discussion along. What surprised her was the direction he took:

“What about our domestic enemies? The Ted Kaczynski Unabomber types?”

That brought James Restess to life. The analyst’s portfolio was exclusively U.S. extremists. Lana had heard him once say that as a nation we should all be glad that Kaczynski was born too early to have used the Internet for his madness.

Restess summarized his research, which included an ample number of profiles. He brought up the names of Islamic militants, some of whom were familiar to Lana, along with members of anarcho-primitivist groups espousing survivalist skills and supporting hackers who attacked corporations — oil, coal, gas companies — deemed enemies to environmental causes. But what shocked Lana was when Restess veered toward a much more mainstream suspect: Ruhi Mancur, the director of research at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She didn’t know Mancur, but NRDC? Christ, she donated money to them.

“Really?” Tenon said when Mancur’s face appeared, sounding as surprised as Lana felt.

“Yes, really,” Restess replied. The NSA analyst bore an uncanny physical resemblance to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom he otherwise had nothing in common. “Mancur has been advocating increasingly militant positions over there”—meaning the NRDC—“and, I’m glad to say, meeting with considerable resistance from his colleagues. But he has sent his own money to groups engaged in illegal occupations of land slated for the latest pipeline the Canadians want for pumping their tar sands oil down from Alberta. And he’s been observed meeting with the more militant factions of the environmental movement. He also has close ties with his Saudi homeland and has traveled extensively in recent years in South Asia and the Middle East.”

“How close are those ties?” Holmes asked. “Because what you just said could apply to thousands of people like him. I’ll tell you, if we sweep him on the basis of that, we’ll be in big trouble, and we’ll deserve it.”

“How about an Al Qaeda cousin who’s clearly linked to terrorist attacks and to Mancur himself? Ruhi Mancur has traveled extensively in recent years to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, and we have it from reliable sources that he has met on a consistent basis with his worthless cousin.”

Restess sounded exercised, to Lana’s ears. And he wasn’t through yet:

“We’ve also unearthed emails that Ruhi Mancur sent to al-Awlaki praising the madman for his work.”

That left everyone at the table silent.

Holmes cleared his throat. “That does place him in a much stricter category. Bring us up to speed on your investigation.”

“Wait just a moment,” Wilkes said. “The Saudis would never countenance this kind of attack. U.S. oil imports from the kingdom are about to fall off a cliff.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Restess said. “But I’m also sure I needn’t remind you that militant Islamists in Saudi Arabia have a history of taking actions highly embarrassing to the country’s leadership.”

“So what steps have you taken?” Holmes asked Restess.

“The attorney general has authorized close surveillance, and we expect FISA warrants shortly on fifteen of our domestic suspects, including Mancur.” A FISA, or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, warrant permitted searches of the property of anyone in the U.S. linked to foreign spies, terrorists, or threats.

“It’s time to do more than surveil,” Holmes said decisively. “Let’s bring them in for some questioning. The country is in meltdown.”

Lana certainly understood the desire to grill Mancur.

Talk about hiding in plain sight.