Fly by Wire

Chapter TWENTY-NINE

At nine o'clock that evening, Herman Coyle was busy crunching numbers in a small office in the White House basement. Darlene Graham had given him the working space on his request. There was a cot in one corner — Coyle had not wanted to waste time commuting on the Beltway — and a dinner tray sat untouched by the door.

He had realized the magnitude of his miscalculations early this afternoon. The initial damage reports, security camera footage, and forensic analysis all confirmed his initial take — that the attacks on America's refineries had been very, very clinical. All but one had targeted the primary crude furnaces. Try as he might, Coyle could not think of a more incapacitating blow. But then, just minutes ago, he'd had his palm-to-the-forehead moment.

It came in the middle of a thick pile, a stack of corporate estimates regarding how long certain refineries would be out of service. Coyle had missed it completely, but at least one corporate planner was right on the ball. Two days ago, Colson Industries, the only domestic maker of crude oil furnaces, had seen their sole manufacturing plant burn to the ground in a suspicious fire. Coyle had been apoplectic. He knew that the production of such hardware was highly specialized — there would never be a widespread need for industrial-grade crude oil heaters when properly maintained units lasted more than a decade.

He quickly discovered that two other manufacturers existed. Or had existed. Russia's Petrov I. A. had been annihilated in a suspicious fire on the very same day Colson Industries had burned. The only survivor, a unit of the Dutch conglomerate DSR, was presently in the middle of a three-month shutdown for retooling. On this day, according to the corporate estimate he had read, there were no more than six replacement crude oil heaters inventoried anywhere in the world.

He continued to enter numbers into his calculator with the eraser of a pencil, the symbology of which did not escape him. New variables entered his mind faster than he could type. How long would it take to refit the Dutch plant? How would the energy markets react? What effect would extreme prices have on demand? The sheer number of variables made any answers he derived useless. Coyle stopped his guesswork.

He slammed the pencil onto his desk and walked quickly to Darlene Graham's office.

Coyle didn't knock, he just barged in.

He found more people than he'd expected. No one had gone home tonight, the administration clearly functioning in crisis mode. Graham was talking on the phone. She looked surprised to see Coyle, but waved for him to take a seat. Coyle took a chair and tried to sit still, but his feet bounced nervously. The director of national intelligence watched him guardedly as she sat with the phone glued to her ear. It was a one-way conversation and she was definitely on the receiving end. When she finally hung up, her face was grim.

Graham got up quickly from her desk, gathering a few fries. "What is it, Dr. Coyle?"

"I was a fool for not seeing it," he began. He told her what he'd found, that a shortage of crude oil heaters was going to aggravate their entire problem. When he started spouting numbers, she cut him off.

"I'm afraid it's even worse, Herman. I just got off the phone with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force Command Center. There's been another round of refinery attacks, even bigger than the first."

Coyle was dumbstruck. "But how? Our security was—"

"They weren't ours. It happened overseas this time. Europe, Asia, the Middle East. At least thirty more strikes." Graham dashed from behind her desk with an armload of manila. As she rushed for the door, she said, "Well come on, Coyle. Oval Office, now!"

Herman Coyle bolted upright and moved.

Truett Townsend was showing his temper again. Coyle watched the president pace in front of the tall bulletproof windows that overlooked the Rose Garden.

"Dammit! Didn't these companies — didn't these governments see what happened to us? They should have stepped up security!"

"A few did," Graham said. "Four, maybe five of the attacks were neutralized, or at least the damage kept to a minimum."

"Four or five out of what — thirty?"

"Thirty-two is the latest," Martin Spector said.

Spector had just arrived, along with Graham and Coyle. Other key members would be trickling in soon, but the president was clearly not in the mood to wait.

"So our plan to buy refined fuel on the open market is shot to hell!" Townsend looked directly at Coyle, waiting for a response.

"It would seem so," Coyle said weakly. He then told the president about his findings regarding the scarcity of crude heaters, and went over his latest calculations. The news was bad, but as he spoke Coyle thought he sensed a settling, as if his words, or maybe his numbers, had a kind of opiate effect on the others. When he finished, everyone deferred to the president.

"All right, Dr. Coyle. So what do you recommend? More pleas for calm?"

In another setting, it might have sounded sarcastic. Coyle, in fact, had spent much of his day analyzing this very question. "Calm? Certainly, Mr. President. But we must face reality. By midday tomorrow there will be cars lined up a hundred deep at every gas station in the country — at least, those stations that don't already have plastic bags over all their pump handles. We must immediately implement a rationing program."

"Rationing!" Spector shouted. "You want to tell Americans that they can only have one tank of gas a week?"

"One tank is probably excessive," Coyle said.

The president turned away and stared out across the South Lawn. He stood motionless, hands on his hips, his eyes seeming to look right through the necklace of headlights that churned over E Street in the distance.

Coyle said, "I am not ignorant of the political ramifications, Mr. President. I think you should stress that this is only a temporary inconvenience. A few months at the outside."

Spector argued, "We are talking about people s livelihoods. How will they get to work, get groceries, go to the doctor? Travel and the kids' hockey games will go right out the window! No, we can't do this!"

"Mr. Spector," Coyle said, "I understand the sacrifices involved in what I am suggesting. But there is no choice here. It is going to happen. All that we in this room can do is manage the discomfort."

Nobody spoke as Coyle s words settled in.

President Townsend seemed to break from his trance, and he turned to face his advisors. "Dr. Coyle is right. Let's get the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security together on this. I want a realistic rationing plan on my desk first thing tomorrow morning." He pointed at Spector. "Crude oil furnaces — our government is now in the manufacturing business. Spend whatever it takes to fast-track these repairs."

The president kept talking. Each new department head that came into the room was given an assignment. At that moment, Herman Coyle was proud of his president, glad he'd voted for the man. As he sat and watched the scene, however, something bothered him. It was triggered when the president started hounding Darlene Graham for new information on Caliph. She had little to give, and somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind Coyle found that he was not surprised.

Someone brought in the latest update and Coyle reached out to take a copy. He saw that it was a partial list of the latest targets. Singapore, Iran, China, Italy. Caliph wasn't playing any favorites. Then something else about the list struck him, the same thing he'd noticed about the domestic attacks — these were not the biggest facilities. They were large, but second tier. Like everyone else, Coyle had reasoned that this was because security would be easier to circumvent. Now he began to revisit the conclusion.

Herman Coyle was not an expert on terrorism or national security. But he was a man of logic. As he considered the attacks, he put them together as a whole and ruminated on the symmetry, the almost mathematical pattern to the sequence of events. And in a moment of clarity that bordered on the divine, there it was — sequence.

He sat very still and an odd corollary flowed to his mind. As a boy, Coyle's hero had been Albert Einstein. He had read everything he could get his hands on about the world s greatest scientist. Einstein's work ethic was legendary, but by his own admission, his fame had been cemented on a few moments of genius. Inspiration sometimes came at four in the morning after spending a long night slugging through equations, and sometimes it came in the shower. Clarity. Herman Coyle had finally had his own moment, and it had come in the Oval Office as the president was barking orders to his director of national intelligence.

Coyle jumped abruptly to his feet and shouted, "It's not Caliph!"

Townsend stopped in mid-sentence. The room fell still, except for the two Secret Service men by the door whose hands were unexpectedly poised at the fronts of their jackets. Coyle relaxed.

"I beg your pardon?" the president said.

"It's not Caliph behind this. At least, not in the way we think."

The president walked across the room, slowly and deliberately, until he stood directly in front of Coyle. He was a good head taller. "Then who should we be looking for?" he asked.

Coyle drew a blank. He had proven one solution wrong, yet not come up with an alternative. "I'm not sure, sir. But I think I can find out.

The president of the United States stared at him hard, like he might divine more detail by some kind of telepathy.

"I'll need a lot of help," Coyle said. "FBI, Secret Service—"

"Secret Service?" Darlene Graham interjected.

"Maybe the SEC. I need full access, everything, and the highest priority. We have to be fast."

Townsend s eyes became slits. "Fast? Why?"

"Because we have less than twenty-four hours."

"Twenty-four hours until what?" the president queried impatiently.

"I don't know. But look at the pattern. On each of the last three days there has been a strike of some sort. It might not be further suicide attacks — but if something else occurs it will likely be on the same schedule. You see, I fear we've totally misread the motivation for these attacks. And if I'm right, I might be able to reverse engineer to discover who is really responsible."

The president kept staring. Then, very slowly, his head began a series of nods that gradually increased in amplitude. On the fifth, he said, "All right, Coyle. Whatever you need, you've got it."