Free Fall

Sixty-Five

Linthicum, Maryland

At that moment, across the country in the Defense Cyber Crime Center, Keith Dorling’s breathing quickened.

“Let’s go over this again. Look at the bus crash.” He was on the phone with a British cyber analyst working on the Zarathustra email that had been received by the Kuwaiti Embassy in London.

“See?” Dorling said. “There was a power outage in London.”

Dorling read the notice aloud: “‘A double-decker bus crash has caused a disruption of power southeast of Hyde Park for the Brompton Road area.’”

“The Kuwaiti Embassy is in the area on Albert Gate,” said Lynn Utley, Dorling’s colleague.

Dorling and Utley scrolled through supplemental information from the Kuwaitis.

“The Kuwaitis said that the crash caused the embassy’s system to go down,” Dorling said. “But the crash happened around midnight. Look at the time shown on the Zarathustra email and the date stamp.”

“How did everyone miss this?” Utley said.

Dorling checked and rechecked.

“See? When power was restored, the system’s time stamp failed to reset correctly,” Dorling said.

“This means the email warning of pain and sorrow was sent before Shikra Airlines Flight 418 crashed at Heathrow and can’t be a wild, after-the-fact boast,” Utley said.

“Yes, they predicted the event. It means they had to have been behind it.”

“We’ve got to alert people,” Utley said.

“They’re going to have to ground everything.”