Lethal Code

CHAPTER 8

As Ruhi Mancur was hauled from his apartment in the heart of Georgetown, even more formidable teams of FBI agents converged on NRDC headquarters in New York City and the NRDC office in Washington.

Agents in the District swept right through the building, as if they knew every detail of the layout. They did. Because Ruhi had been a “subject of interest” for many months, schematics of the NRDC offices had been drawn up. After the grid went down, all the agents assigned to his case — and there were now several dozen — were given copies of the layout to study.

A corps of agents headed directly to Ruhi’s office, commandeering the space and overseeing the methodical removal of all the office equipment that he conceivably could have used. That included computer components for NRDC copiers, along with memory chips for every other device that kept records, which included most everything in the building, short of the furniture. They spared the energy-saving thermostats on the walls.

Other agents demanded the surrender of all recording devices from NRDC personnel. That meant, of course, cell phones. When a wiry, bearded, middle-aged man demanded to know why, the curt response was, “National security.”

A young, summer-suited man made the mistake of trying to surreptitiously record the raid anyway, perhaps with visions of YouTube fame in mind. Agents grabbed him immediately and forced him against the wall for a pat-down. He was Flex-Cuffed and led away.

“What are you doing? This is an outrage,” a younger, fair-skinned woman yelled at the agents.

Coworkers tried to calm her, but she shouted, “I will not be silenced.”

Silenced? No. But arrested when she nonsensically tried to block agents from entering a conference room.

Lawyers for the environmental organization pored over the legal documents provided by the FBI team. NRDC’s legal staff studied the papers they’d been served, but the best legal minds in the environmental movement were accustomed to fighting civil actions on behalf of air, land, and water — and the people affected in those cases. They appeared to be on less confident ground parsing documents related to the arrest of their director of research. Most of them looked stunned to learn that Mancur had been swept up by the FBI as part of its investigation.

“We’re absolutely certain that you’ll find everything in order,” said the FBI’s lead counsel.

“Is this really necessary?” asked his counterpart at NRDC. The woman was in her fifties with sensibly styled short gray hair that matched her equable manner. The latter was considerably at odds with the attitude taken by the junior staffer who would not be silenced, who, in fact, was still shouting as she was dragged out of the building.

After glancing toward the departing uproar, the older woman said, “We are certainly prepared to cooperate with any legitimate investigation.”

“That’s where we might be at loggerheads,” the Bureau lawyer said. “The word ‘legitimate’ is highly subject to contention. We are not taking any chances. I’m sure you can understand why.”

It was not a plea. It was a clear allusion to the cyberattack, from which the country could not possibly recover for many months. The stock market had crashed to record lows, the U.S. dollar was at its lowest ebb in history, and martial law was unlikely to be suspended anytime soon because every day the number of “domestic disturbances” increased, setting abysmal records for what others simply called riots.

“Where have you taken Ruhi?” an NRDC field director asked. He had just burst out of the lavatory to find an office in tumult.

“We are not at liberty to comment,” said a hawk-faced FBI agent in his early thirties. He spoke with a smile that appeared plastered to his face. “We can say only that he has been taken into custody for questioning.”

“Has he seen a lawyer yet?” demanded NRDC’s counsel, who appeared to be tiring quickly of the boilerplate responses she was receiving.

“We can’t comment on that, either,” the smiling agent replied.

“I didn’t ask you,” she replied, “I asked him”—training her eyes back on the Bureau’s legal talent—“lawyer to lawyer.”

“Lawyer to lawyer, I’d have to say that we can’t comment on that,” her counterpart said.

Up in New York City, the personnel files of the organization were being loaded on to handcarts and trundled out the door to long black vans waiting on West Twentieth Street. At the same time, dozens of computers were carried carefully out of the building by a stream of agents.

Stunned NRDC staffers watched in silence as the office was swiftly stripped of almost all its electronic devices. In New York, it was the group’s legal counsel, not a lower-ranking employee, who went ballistic. That happened after the regal-looking lawyer was served with the search warrant by the FBI attorney overseeing the raid. Then she was told by a husky agent to hand over her phone, laptop, and “any other electronic devices.”

The woman raised her voice in protest, saying, “Just stop this right now. I mean immediately.”

“Please provide the requested devices, ma’am,” the agent said evenly, “or we’ll have to place you under arrest.”

“You do that,” she declared. “And I’ll see you in court.”

“Yes, ma’am, you will.”

She smacked the search warrant down on a desk repeatedly. A fellow employee stopped her. She handed over her devices and walked away, visibly shaken.

Deputy Director Holmes sat at his desk receiving a live video stream from both locations on a wide split screen. Witnessing the NRDC’s New York lawyer’s explosion made him grateful that no news media had been permitted anywhere near either location, and that those recording devices had been confiscated so quickly. Watching a search warrant executed was rarely a joyful experience when it involved a staid establishment like the NRDC, a legal entity that he actually held in high regard. But one’s personal feelings could never come into play at times like this, because keeping the nation secure was not for the faint of heart. Then he cringed, thinking that even the strong of heart hadn’t fared very well in that mission lately.

Donna Warnes sat by Holmes’s side, laptop open so she could take notes. But Holmes said nothing. He watched and listened in silence to the live video streams of the raids. He always worried at times like this that a suicide bomber would suddenly appear. It was not a rational response, and he knew that; but it wasn’t a rational world, and he knew that even better.

When it appeared that both search warrants were being executed without incident, he turned back to reviewing the interrogation video of Ruhi Mancur. They had paused it just as the two agents who were grilling Mancur turned their attention from the murder of his landlord to questions about the cyberattack. Mancur had asserted that he’d locked himself in his apartment and remained there during the time that shots were fired in the lobby — when Halpen, apparently, was murdered. Voice stress analysis indicated that Mancur might well be telling the truth.

The voice technology was hardly the final word, but it synced with Holmes’s own assessment of Mancur, and with the physical evidence acquired to that point.

The murder weapon, for instance, had not been found, and it was not easy to conceive of how Mancur could have killed Halpen if he’d been locked in his residence until the FBI arrested him. And it was unlikely that he had left, considering the hostility of a mob that from all reports was clamoring to kill him.

Possibly, final answers about Halpen’s murder would come after forensics scrutinized every square inch of the man’s apartment, but the initial search — and it had been thorough — turned up no firearms in Mancur’s residence. Neither was a gun found in Candace Anders’s apartment upstairs, which Mancur could have had access to, considering the compromised condition of the door.

Agent Anders had rented it as part of her FBI undercover assignment. She had done an outstanding job of insinuating herself into Mancur’s life at a most propitious time. And her valiant defense of him — at deadly risk to her own life — would earn her Holmes’s nomination for a National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the top honor in the intelligence field.

Holmes could scarcely imagine what it would look like right now if their chief suspect, in the most damaging attack ever endured by the country, had been murdered by a mob. It would have smacked of Jack Ruby rubbing out Lee Harvey Oswald, only much, much worse.

Not on my watch.

Holmes resumed the interrogation video. The two agents were now boring in on Mancur about the cyberattack. The suspect remained as steadfast in denying that crime as he had been about the murder. Well, that certainly was no surprise to Holmes; he had received updates on the questioning, and he knew Mancur hadn’t confessed, but he’d wanted to “read” the man himself.

At that moment, Holmes received an encrypted message on his computer that made him moan. It contained an update of the voice stress analysis that was unsettling: In denying the cyberattack, Mancur had registered readings remarkably similar to his answers about the shooting. Ditto for his denial of having ever had any affiliation “whatsoever” with Islamists, including Al Qaeda.

The latest results bothered Holmes deeply. They’d polygraph Mancur, too, but Holmes had a bad feeling that Mancur was a good guy.

He rubbed his forehead so hard that he might have been trying work a genie out of a magic lamp. The effort earned him only a concerned look from Donna, which he did not acknowledge.

And then it got even worse. Another encrypted message said that Mancur came out with similarly consistent results when he confessed, of all things, to cheating on his taxes by phonying meetings with solar energy experts in Pakistan.

Like we care about that crap, Holmes said to himself. Does he actually think we want to nab him the way Hoover nailed Al Capone?

Those were the days, when life was simple. Not that Holmes had lived through them himself, but he was sure you could be nostalgic for times you’d never known, because that was exactly how he felt right now.

Could the stakes possibly be higher? They’d arrested a man of Saudi descent, which was getting huge attention around the world, and the suspect was passing voice stress analysis without missing a beat. If he really was innocent, that meant that their best hope of finding a fast means to stop a final and decisive cyberattack was vanishing. Any second now the country might get plunged back into darkness. Holmes had absolutely no doubt that the terrorists would follow up just as they had promised.

Cocky sons of bitches.

They had to be supremely confident that they could deliver their coup de grâce, or they wouldn’t be waiting. And he had to grant that they’d earned the right to their sickening self-assurance.

In his estimation, the only reason the enemy hadn’t shut down the grid for good was that the anxiety over when that would happen was producing unprecedented social unrest, as well as the means to display the complete demoralization of the United States to the world. From Beijing to Patagonia, from Stockholm to Johannesburg, people were tuning in to video showing Americans in full-scale panic, replete with looting and burning and massive lawbreaking by ordinary citizens. Talk about a propaganda coup. Why would any enemy throw the death switch now? Let her roll. They were probably offering hosannas to whatever deity they worshipped.

Holmes thought the grid would go down for good only when Americans hit rock bottom, leaving his most haunting question unanswered: How much further down the devolutionary scale would the country fall?

He paused the Mancur video and leaned back in his chair. Then he looked at Donna. He had all manner of experts at his command — voice analysts and forensic psychiatrists and cybersecurity geniuses, among scores of others — but it was Donna, with her associate of arts degree from some obscure junior college in Arizona, whose opinion he often valued most at times like this.

He didn’t even need to ask. She shook her head, saying, “I don’t think so.”

Not bad, he thought, for not having seen the results of the voice stress analysis.

“Meaning?” He wanted her to be completely clear.

“I don’t think he had a hand in it.”

NSA chief James Bolls would howl if he ever got a gander at this scene, but Donna had been right much more often than most of the higher-priced talent. She swore that she had developed her “BS detector,” as she put it delicately, by raising three daughters, all of whom hit their teens in the 1990s. “If you can decode an adolescent girl’s excuses and ‘stories,’ these guys become a piece of cake” was her explanation for her strange prowess.

“How do you figure the links to terrorists that they found on his laptop?” he asked her.

Links that on the face of it were powerfully persuasive. The cyberforensics squad had already uncovered communication with known Islamist officers in the Pakistan military and with various chieftains in the northwestern region of that country. About the only thing they hadn’t found yet were communiqués from the caves of Waziristan, like the burrow that had proved so hospitable to bin Laden at Tora Bora. But given the enormous sophistication of the attacks, Holmes was reasonably sure that they weren’t emanating from the medieval reaches of the planet’s most infamous redoubt.

“I don’t know, Bob.” Donna turned informal only when they were alone. “Except maybe he was right when he said the Chinese might try to frame him. Whatever the reason, I think he’s telling the truth.”

“I don’t see any Chinese hand in this attack,” Holmes said at last. “I agree with McGivern on that.” The gray-haired analyst had agreed to postpone her retirement at his request.

“We’re not talking about the attack per se,” Donna replied. “We’re talking about the Chinese exploiting an anticipated attack by planting evidence, in advance, against its enemies. We know they’re opportunists of the first order. You’ve said so yourself many times, whether it’s computers or cars or flat-screen TVs. So let’s look at it this way: What if the Chinese saw an attack on the U.S. coming, even just a strong possibility of it, and put the Islamist evidence on Mancur’s computer because they wanted him silenced? However they do that stuff.”

Holmes had to suppress a smile. Donna had a clear conceptual grasp of cybersecurity, and could handle all manner of office systems, but when it came to the bytes and packets of cyberspying, all she had was her golden gut.

“It’s possible,” Holmes allowed. “But it’s hard for me to accept that the Chinese would have bet on the come, so to speak, and done it with such success.”

“Well,” she said with a shrug, “they had a strong reason to frame Mancur, even if they didn’t launch the attack themselves.”

Donna was referring to Mancur’s contention that the Chinese were angry with him because of his vehement and outspoken opposition to the pipeline that would carry crude from the Canadian tar sands down to the Gulf Coast. The bulk of the Canadian oil wasn’t going to the U.S. but to China, to feed that country’s seemingly insatiable thirst for energy. It was now the world’s number-one emitter of carbon dioxide.

Donna went on: “The defense secretary himself said publicly that we could be looking at the Pearl Harbor of cyberwar, long before this ever happened. I’ll bet there were all kinds of skulduggery going on in the cybersphere.”

“This was no Pearl,” Holmes said. “This was a lot worse.”

But he couldn’t quarrel with Donna’s larger point: The secretary of defense had been very public about U.S. vulnerability to cyberattack. Holmes knew that all too well, because he had helped craft the statement the secretary delivered when he stepped in front of the cameras to alert the public and Congress. Everyone in the intelligence community had hoped the man’s words would provide a strong warning — and great impetus for strengthening American defenses against cyberattacks. In the end, though, Congress had sat on its hands, and the message proved more prophetic than powerful.

It was never pleasant being right about disastrous outcomes, and that had been confirmed, once again, this morning when a gaggle of congressmen called for the defense secretary’s dismissal.

“I suppose you could ask the Chinese about it when they stop by,” Donna said.

She wasn’t kidding. A Chinese delegation was actually heading to the White House to talk directly with the president. The Russians had booked some of his time as well.

The leadership of both countries had raced to assure the administration that they’d had nothing to do with the attack. China and Russia, independent of each other, had also assured the U.S. leadership that they had started investigations of their own to find the perpetrators.

Holmes believed both countries on both counts. Why wouldn’t they do all they could to eliminate such a maverick terrorist threat? Russia and China could also become targets of a rogue warrior. And both nations had large stakes in America’s welfare. That was especially true of China, which was the single-largest holder of U.S. dollars, and whose own economy, after blazing along for years on the strength of low wages, cheap exports, and currency manipulation, was starting to sputter. The last thing the Chinese wanted was the U.S. in its present, weakened state — or worse, if the plug were pulled for good. They already had lost hundreds of billions with the collapse of the dollar.

Russian willingness to help the U.S. stemmed, first, from not wanting to endure the enmity of the world’s foremost military power; even in its greatly weakened state, the U.S. arsenal was not to be trifled with. And second, Holmes knew the Russians did not want to see their ally Iran blamed for the attack; they would undoubtedly make the case for not moving against Iran when they had their meeting in the Oval Office.

Russia’s reasons for trying to keep the Iranians out of U.S. crosshairs were geopolitical in nature. The Great Bear and Iran shared a common interest in wanting to limit U.S. influence in Central Asia, and the two had formed a gas exporters’ organization to further their individual and mutual interests.

But a lot of U.S. fingers were pointing to Iran, particularly because in recent history it had been identified as the source of Shamoon, a crippling cyberattack on Aramco, the state-owned Saudi oil company that also happened to be the world’s most valuable firm. Iran’s Shamoon virus erased critical data on seventy-five percent of Aramco’s corporate PCs. That was an extraordinary amount of information, including spreadsheets, files, emails, and documents.

To add insult to considerable injury, the data was replaced with an image of a burning American flag, driving home a point widely held in the Middle East — that Saudi Arabia was little more than an American proxy.

The attack on Aramco was “a significant escalation of the cyberthreat,” in the defense secretary’s words at the time. Holmes was certain of their accuracy because he had also penned them.

Shamoon had been part of an escalating cyberwar between Iran and the U.S. that America had actually started when it launched Stuxnet, the worm that targeted Iranian centrifuges at a nuclear facility — and then squirmed past its target to infect millions of computers worldwide.

The U.S. also took aim at Iran with Flame, a virus that went after the Iranian oil industry. It forced Iran to shut off Internet connections to their Kharg Island oil terminal, through which eighty percent of that country’s oil exports flowed. Flame also smacked down Internet service to Iranian oil rigs and the country’s oil ministry itself, which wreaked all sorts of havoc pleasing to the U.S.

So the tit-for-tat had taken its toll, especially on the Iranians. But would that have prompted them to launch an all-out attack on the U.S.?

Holmes had no love for the Iranians, but he didn’t think they were responsible for the devastation of the past few days. The mullahs running the show in Tehran were too calculating for that, in his view. And those religious leaders knew their country’s cyberwarriors were still too inept to avoid leaving identifying clues in their viruses. That was clearly evident in Shamoon, which had been quickly traced to the Persian Gulf power. Even the most fanatical Shiites in Iran had to know that their country would be demolished if a wholesale attack on the U.S. were ever traced to them.

Though Holmes was operationally dubious of agents in situ — preferring intercepted communication from the source — those on the ground in Tehran felt certain that the Iranians “weren’t that crazy,” as the CIA’s most highly prized asset put it.

But that didn’t stop the punditocracy from going berserk. Last night, as Holmes tried to relax with a nightcap by watching a late-night Fox broadcast, one of the network’s dimmest bulbs started humming an old Beach Boys song.

“Oh, Christ,” Holmes mumbled, knowing what was coming.

Sure enough, the anchor, who couldn’t find his way out of a hallway with an exit sign at both ends, started reprising John McCain’s take on the classic, “Barbara Ann”: “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran…”

What was it about the drumbeat for war? Holmes wondered as Donna gathered up her computer and retreated to her office, sensing, as she often did, when her boss needed time to think.

Holmes had earned his stripes, and then some, in Vietnam. There was nothing romantic about that war. It was all mud and blood and gore, and though he kept his political preferences to himself, he loathed, to his very core, the non-vets who called for war, even when they were right. He could never say so publicly, given the string of non-vets for whom he’d served — Clinton, Bush/Cheney, Obama — but that’s how he felt. The hell with political correctness.

His phone brightened; Donna was alerting him that two of his top cyberforensic specialists were outside his office. Holmes said to send them in.

He thought of them as twins because they were both dark-haired, mustached, and in their early thirties. They also spent a lot of time with each other outside Fort Meade. Not that Holmes cared. He was glad that people could no longer be blackmailed for their sexual orientation. Made for better national security.

The two stood stiffly in front of his desk, which was par for the course.

“Sit down,” he told them.

Jason, the taller one, settled first. He tugged on his lab partner’s sleeve, startling Jacob. The shorter man might have been in a daze.

Holmes watched Jacob Rena sit, wondering if he’d fallen asleep on his feet. Nobody was getting much shut-eye with the cyberattacker’s Damocles’s sword hanging over the nation’s head.

“What have you found?” Holmes asked Jason Barnes. With their given names both beginning with J, Holmes had often thought it was as if they’d been coordinating their lives since birth. At least Jason was taller and generally more dominant. It helped to keep them separate in Holmes’s mind.

Predictably, Jason delivered the news: “We’ve recovered another cache of emails that Mancur sent to Anwar al-Awlaki,” the U.S.-born Muslim cleric who was killed by an American drone attack. “It turns out that Mancur was a big fan of the guy’s videos.”

Awlaki, a leading Al Qaeda figure in Yemen, had made scores of pro-Islamist videos extolling terrorism against the U.S. And he’d had his macabre successes, most prominently Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood, Texas, who shot and killed thirteen people at the base, wounding thirty-two others. The massacre took place after Hasan exchanged inflammatory emails with the radical cleric.

“Looks like Awlaki really did inspire the biggest killer ever from the grave,” Jason added.

“How many emails to Awlaki?” asked Holmes.

“Twenty-three in the latest batch. We’re still working on it,” Jason replied. “We thought you’d want to know right away.”

“I do. What’s Mancur saying in his emails?”

“You could safely put them in the category of more fan mail,” Jason answered.

“In some of them, to Islamists in Pakistan,” Jacob added, “Mancur sounds incensed that a drone killed Awlaki’s son.”

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen like his father, was sixteen when he was killed with others by a U.S. drone a month after his father died. Like father, like son was the consensus in the intelligence community, but the killing of the kid had raised a ruckus among human rights activists that had yet to settle down. National security, Holmes reminded himself, was not for the faint of heart.

“Do you want this released to the media?” Jason asked, sitting up straight, which made him tower over his lab partner.

Holmes thought Jason was clearly energized by the prospect of his investigation finding a larger audience. Which immediately placed him in Holmes’s mental suspect file, in the event there were ever any leaks from the man’s department.

“Let me think about that,” Holmes said and dismissed them.

He watched them file out, not the least bit satisfied with their findings. It was a little too pat, wasn’t it? he asked himself. Finding more of them? It made Holmes think that the Chinese might, in fact, be setting up Mancur. It was just like them to manufacture every last bit of possible evidence. The Chinese had a penchant for larding on the “evidence,” as if they had little faith in their most straightforward lies. Tossing in al-Awlaki was like throwing in the Islamist kitchen sink.

He brought up the interrogation video and watched it for a few more minutes.

Would prosecutors ever get a jury to convict Mancur? Holmes shook his head. Not if the Donna Warnes of the world were sitting in judgment.

What about you? he asked himself. Would you vote to convict?

Jury’s still out.

Ruhi forced himself to sit down in his cell. Every horrific photo he’d ever seen of Abu Ghraib came back to him now. Dogs snarling at the faces of bound prisoners, naked men stacked on top of one another like cordwood, and always, always that pathetic Army grunt, Lynndie England, standing with a leash around the neck of a Muslim man lying on the floor of a cell block. Ghastly. And that’s what he might be in for now. Probably worse. They thought he’d been party to the worst attack on the U.S. ever. They wanted to know whom he’d been working with. What was he supposed to say? The truth? He’d tried telling them the truth. They didn’t want to hear the truth. Soon they’d subject him to sleep deprivation, hallucinations, earsplitting rap music 24/7. Waterboarding.

Fear made his stomach so tight that he could have been swallowing boulders all afternoon, instead of the bile that even now seeped into his mouth.

At least his story had been consistent. And why wouldn’t it be? The truth was simple to keep track of. But the truth wouldn’t be good enough. He could tell by the way they questioned him that soon his adopted country would torture him, and he knew — had no doubt — that he wouldn’t last two seconds once they put pliers near his fingernails. He’d tell them anything they wanted to hear, for all the good it would do, but then his story would be inconsistent and they’d accuse him of lying. And that would be all the excuse they’d need to use the worst torture on him. That’s probably exactly what happened to everyone who found himself in one of these cells, guilty or not.

“Did you commit these acts against America?”

He spoke to himself as he imagined some central figure would in the plot against him. He saw the man not as an American jurist but, bizarrely, as a British officer of the court in a white wig.

Where do I get this crap from? And when will I get to see a lawyer?

Under the terrorism laws, he could vanish into the American version of the old Russian gulag — but with the added, all-American patina of patriotism and torture.

Ruhi thought-felt-feared all of this over and over. He lay back on his simple bunk and stared at the ceiling, knowing that somewhere a lens stared back at him from whatever impregnable material kept him incarcerated.

Maybe Candace, too. Is she watching?

She’d worked him like a puppet, and he’d bought into her. Oh, God, had he ever. More than that, he’d fallen for her. He thought she was so honest. The most honest woman he’d ever met. He cringed when he remembered saying that to himself. But when the FBI came calling at his apartment, the only way agents could have known that he’d had a bureau in front of his door was if they’d had one of their own right next to him during the terrifying encounters of the previous twenty-four hours. At that very instant he’d known who Candace really was. All her gunplay, bravado, and coolness under fire had come from Quantico as much as Kabul — if her stint at the embassy were even true.

And yet, if she hadn’t defended him, he’d be dead. She’d put her own life on the line to save his. That had to mean something, right? Or was he deluding himself once more? Forgetting that protecting him was her duty. She was paid to do it.

But wasn’t there something between them? He couldn’t forget the moment on the love seat when they’d stared into each other’s eyes. One second longer, a half inch closer, and they would have kissed. They would have.

He closed his eyes now, tried to measure his breath. Sweat trickled down his checks.

Ruhi felt lost, like Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial. He’d read it in Honors English at the University of Vermont. What was happening to him was different, but strangely similar. Only it was worse because when he’d read the book, he’d only glimpsed the horror of accusation. And while it had etched itself into his memory, it was nothing compared to this. Now he knew the horror firsthand.

Kafka’s book had ended with a knife. Ruhi could feel cold, sharp steel coming for him. Sooner or later it would find his heart, and — worst of all — Ruhi could imagine how he, too, would say, “Like a dog,” as his last words. Yes, he would also die like a dog, but only after screaming anything they wanted to hear.

He lay there, eyes closed, thinking, It’s only just begun.

He had no idea.

Lana made it into CyberFortress by midafternoon. Jeff Jensen reported that he expected to have CF’s systems clean in twenty-four hours.

“Do you think you’ll ever be able to confirm that it was the Chinese?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not going to rest till I do.” It sounded like a vow.

“Make sure you let people get a breather around here. There are lots of personal challenges that everybody’s facing, and you’re going to be running things for the foreseeable future.”

Jensen was a good one to leave in charge while she worked with the team at NSA. The sober-minded Mormon had a like-minded wife who ran their house full-time, with the same efficient friendliness that her husband showed at work.

“All right.” She rose from her desk. “I’m going home to spend the evening with Emma. I hope she’s okay. I feel like a totally negligent mother.”

She’d tried calling and texting Emma, but her daughter wasn’t responding, which meant she was either feeling too crummy, which was scary, or so good that she was too busy texting her friends to bother with her mom. That would be irritating — to the extreme.

“Audrey asked Irene Johansson if she’d please go back.”

“She did?” Audrey was Jensen’s executive assistant. Another Mormon.

“Irene’s in her ward.” A Mormon administrative district. “She pointed out that it was vital to national security that she help Emma for you.”

Jensen spoke with just the lightest hint of irony.

“That’s good news, I think,” Lana said, wondering how Emma was responding to these machinations. “I’m going to head out.”

“Audrey says it’s working out just fine with Irene and Emma.”

And it was. When Lana walked in the door, Emma was curled up on the couch, meds on the end table. Irene sat next to her in an armchair. The television was on — horrific aerial shots of the huge forest fire near Denver that had started after a pipeline explosion.

“The president’s going to be on, Mom,” Emma said drowsily.

“When did they announce this?” Lana asked. She’d heard nothing about it, and she’d been listening to NPR until she pulled into the garage.

“Just like a minute ago,” Emma said. She slurred her words but seemed to speak with little discomfort.

Lana greeted Irene, mouthing “Thank you” when Emma’s eyes returned to the TV.

She shifted the girl’s feet and sat down, then placed them on her lap. Emma practically purred. She sure seemed agreeable.

The station switched to the White House Briefing Room, where the president was walking to the lectern. He looked, in a word, shaken, as if he’d been rushed from the Oval Office to make a statement. Maybe they were doing it on such short notice to prevent the cyberterrorists from shutting down his address to the nation. Nonetheless, she thought the president’s makeup team could have spruced him up for his first public words since the attack.

“Good evening, my fellow Ameri—”

Right then the power went out and came back on almost immediately. It did that two more times in rapid succession. Then three more times — but slowly. The president looked around, as if lost.

Don’t look weak. Don’t!

The power came and went three more times quickly, before coming back on for good.

Lana slumped back into the couch when she recognized the pattern. It was the international distress signal: · · · — — · · ·

SOS. Save Our Ship.

Of state, Lana realized.

Her faced reddened. Her hands curled into fists.

Mocked by a murderous unseen enemy.

The president persevered with his short speech, but not impressively. The great orator, who many had said was a throwback to another era with his magnificent metaphors, uplifting language, and ringing intonations, sounded flat — all fizzed out. He told his “fellow Americans” to stay calm, even as he appeared defeated and bewildered. Then, after a few minutes of speaking — which proved painful to watch — he looked left and right of the lectern, as if bereft of direction, and walked away.

Reporters yelled questions at him. They were boisterous, maybe even outraged. But the president’s one good move, in Lana’s opinion, was to never turn back to face them. That would have been another mark of indecision. If he looked shaky before his exit, at least he proved resolute in his leave taking. Small consolation, she thought.

The Morse code — the SOS — appeared to have rattled him. Lana presumed the president had decoded it in the moment, as she had, or that someone had informed him almost instantaneously. The bald irony of the message itself was unnerving: using the earliest means of telecommunications to scuttle the first few words of a president’s address about the most sophisticated attack in world history.

We have you coming and going.

In so many words, that was what the enemy had said, Lana realized.

And maybe that was what had flustered the president most: that the enemy had infiltrated the most critical circuits in the country — the ones that kept the White House at the center of world power.