Lethal Code

CHAPTER 3

Ruhi Mancur didn’t see the smoke rising above the city, much less the plumes drifting over the Capitol. Not yet, anyway. His eyes were on a smooth footpath that meandered alongside the slowly flowing Potomac River, his favorite part of the morning’s eight-mile run.

He heard sirens, but that wasn’t unusual in Washington. Neither was it unusual for him to ignore them. When he hit the trails, he paid little attention to anything but the American pop of his immigrant youth. His parents had brought him to D.C. from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when he was seven, and he loved listening to his iPod. Right now it was filling his head with the exuberance of Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He never tired of her anthem, always recalling her crazy dresses and hair, and the brightly colored bangles and bodices that made her look like an exotic tropical species with a rich plumage all her own. Living under the House of Saud, he’d never seen anything remotely like Lauper, that’s for sure. For him, the pop star had always personified the irrepressibly relaxed wonder of America.

But right now her music helped him ignore the world as he put his body through its rigors. He was a broad-shouldered veteran of fourteen marathons, and Lauper had made many of those miles bearable. So even on a bad day, the frenetic interference of the nation’s capital was a poor opponent of Ruhi’s amply armed iPod. And a brisk Monday-morning run was an altogether marvelous way to start his week, before going to work at the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC. He liked to think that the organization got some “mileage” out of the irony that he hailed from a country in which oil accounted for ninety-five percent of its exports and seventy percent of its profits. Very much the lapsed Saudi.

But as Ruhi headed back to Georgetown, the sirens and alarms grew uncomfortably loud and vastly more numerous until they bled over one another and forced him to recognize that they were going off all at once. It was like cell phones in a crisis, which, from all appearances — a rush of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars — was taking place.

That’s when he paused and emerged from his endorphin fog. Traffic lights were not working — and they hadn’t been since he’d turned from the river. He’d been darting across streets on automatic pilot. But now he recognized a change in the city’s pulse. Cars were doing a fair amount of darting as well, slowing down and then blowing through dark intersections. Their scurrying reminded him of the city’s rats when headlights lit them up. But admittedly, he wasn’t a big fan of the country’s automobile culture, which was strike two against him as an expat Saudi, because his countrymen had long adored American muscle cars.

Moreover, he spied an urgency in the drivers’ faces that made him wary of sprinting across any more streets. Better to dodge and feint and take nothing for granted. As an urban runner — fleet-footed, but calm in demeanor — he was accustomed to the mindless quirks of motorists, but the gunning of engines and screeching of brakes was all out of proportion to the simple power outage that he observed. In short, he sensed a palpable panic beyond the measure of ordinary turmoil.

Everywhere he looked — cars, cabs, pedestrians — people appeared on edge. Nothing had power. No cheery welcome or open signs blazed in shop windows. And there was no Internet, either, to judge by the frustrated reactions of people staring dumbfounded at their suddenly not-so-smart phones.

Ruhi had left his at home, as he generally did for his daily run.

He turned down M Street, one of Georgetown’s main thoroughfares, and headed home, passing a Starbucks where the green-apron brigade was busy apologizing profusely as it ushered customers out the door—sans java.

Not far from his apartment, Ruhi ran right past the location of Alexander Graham Bell’s first switching office more than one hundred years ago. That irony did not elude him, either.

As he bounded up the granite steps of an old, distinguished townhouse, long ago converted into a tony fourplex, he had to step aside for Candace Anders. She’d moved into one of the upstairs units last month — and shot right to the top of Ruhi’s list of desirable neighbors. That was saying a lot about Candace’s blond, ponytailed appeal, because Ruhi’s leafy street had lots of eye candy of the female persuasion.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Ruhi asked Candace, as casually as if they had shared much more than passing nods on those steps.

“It’s definitely a power outage,” she said, which, of course, added little to what Ruhi already knew.

But he had gleaned a fair amount about Candace from the Web, once he learned that she was a recent hire of her conservative Indiana congressman. That made her one of “them,” in Ruhi’s world: a climate-change denier and tool of Big Oil and Big Coal. It was hard not to peg them quickly when you were the director of research for the NRDC. Ruhi knew the congressional roll call as well as the sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate.

Before he could riff on power outages and the nation’s insatiable appetite for energy, Candace went on:

“It may actually be a lot more than a glitch in the grid. Somebody running by said the blackout is all across the country.”

“Really?” That stunned Ruhi. It would be a first, according to everything he had read about power outages in his adopted country, which was voluminous. “A total blackout?”

“That’s what I heard—” She sounded like she’d cut herself off.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, there was a rumor flying around the Capitol that a cyberattack had been launched by jihadists.”

“Oh, no,” he groaned. As a dark-skinned Middle Easterner who had endured his share of open hostility in his adopted country after 9/11, he was mindful of what that rumor could mean.

“It’s not confirmed.”

“But it was the first one to come up, I’ll bet,” he replied.

She didn’t disagree.

He hoped to God his countrymen hadn’t done anything now. They’d had a notorious role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The last thing he wanted to hear was that more religious zealots had claimed the mantle of Mohammed to serve their own earthly needs. He just wished he could convey his harsh judgment of extremists to a dark-suited guy in a Lincoln Navigator who was giving him the stink eye as he drove by.

He and Candace paused at the top of the steps to look down the street. Neither said a word for several seconds. He wanted to see if she’d continue the discussion. In truth, he figured Candace probably held deep suspicions about Muslims, even lapsed ones like him. That was strike three, in the view of most Saudis.

A man in a pinstripe suit swore loudly as he hurried past them, working his phone with both thumbs. Then he looked around and declared, “Nothing’s working,” before jamming the device into his pocket.

“I can’t get online, either,” Candace said. She looked at Ruhi expectantly. “You?”

“I don’t have it with me.”

“That’s a first for this town. I’m not saying it’s jihadists, but it does smack of a cyberattack.”

“What makes you say that?” It hadn’t occurred to Ruhi, but the possibility sure grabbed his attention. He knew plenty about energy consumption and distribution in the U.S., and if this was, indeed, a nationwide problem, cyberattack made grim sense.

“I guess it could be a Martian invasion,” she said, “but short of aliens, nothing else explains it.”

“Bombs would. A tightly coordinated widespread attack might.”

“We’d know about the attacks,” she replied. “We’d have instant reports, instead of an instant loss of power.”

“If that’s the case, we’re in serious trouble,” he replied. “This could go on and on. Do you know about ‘just-in-time delivery’?”

She shook her head.

“It’s a wonkish kind of thing.”

Happy to have her attention, he explained that the U.S. was highly dependent on centralized power plants that replaced broken parts — even the most vital ones — on the so-called just-in-time delivery principle.

“It’s just the opposite of ‘in stock,’” he went on. “It means that if a cyberattack on a power plant forces a big turbine to spin so fast that it tears itself apart, it could take six months before anybody can build the replacement and put it in place. You can thank deregulation for that.” Starting with your boss, he almost added.

Candace shook her head and lifted her eyebrows, which Ruhi found an endearing way to disagree with him. In fact, it made him wish that he’d left out the jab about deregulation.

“If it is a cyberattack,” she said, “we’d better start thinking about China. Or blowback for our cyberattacks on Iran. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they’d decided to retaliate massively and anonymously.”

He was surprised to hear those words coming from a staffer for a congressman who’d supported every war the U.S. had engaged in for the past four decades.

“Have you had a chance to tell your boss that?” he asked mischievously.

“No! I like my job.”

She smiled, and it occurred to him that he might be cultivating a source on a conservative congressman’s staff.

Or she’s cultivating you.

Jarred from their conversation by a boisterous crowd of about fifteen young men — late teens, early twenties — racing around the corner. They spotted him immediately and yelled “raghead.”

Oh, shit. That’s also when he spotted huge funnels of smoke rising into the sky from the heart of the nation’s capital.

“What’s going—”

Ruhi interrupted Candace by taking her arm and hurrying her to the door of the converted townhouse. Locked, of course.

The young men were stampeding now, perhaps spurred by his own rush to get inside. He looked back and found them only two townhouses away, fury contorting their faces. They had closed the gap to within a hundred feet. He heard Candace swear under her breath as he fidgeted with his key. He looked again.

Fifty feet.

He knew he was going to get severely beaten, at best. He didn’t even want to consider what might happen to an ingénue from the drought-stricken cornfields of the Midwest who was audacious enough to consort with a “raghead.”

Twenty-five feet.

He managed to work the key into the old lock, but it was catching on something.

“Come on!” she whispered.

He hated that lock. He jiggled it frantically…

Ten feet.

… and the lock slid open.

She rushed inside. He followed a breath behind, slamming the door and locking it just as the thick wood thundered from pounding fists and boots. Unseen hands grabbed the handle and tried to force it open. He thought he heard a gunshot.

“My place,” she shouted. “Upstairs.”

They raced past Ruhi’s first-level apartment and up the broad stairs that rose from the grand old entryway. He heard the door rattling behind them and looked back as an elderly neighbor stepped out of her downstairs apartment.

“Go back inside,” Ruhi stopped to yell. He gestured wildly at the front door. “And lock up!”

“What?” she said, slowly inserting her hearing aid.

A loud crash turned their attention to the front door. The mob had split the top part right down the middle. Two gunshots plowed into the handle and lock. Ruhi was sure about the shots this time, but the door still didn’t give.

A face appeared in the opening. Ruhi felt like the easiest target in all of D.C. The guy’s gaze followed Candace rounding the top of the stairs. Ruhi was glad the man wasn’t the shooter.

“Go back inside,” Ruhi screamed at the older woman as he resumed his sprint up the stairs. But she had figured out the threat on her own and was hobbling into her apartment.

Ruhi was sure he was dead if the mob broke down the door. This was much more anger than the worst animosity that he had experienced after 9/11. And the guy who had his face in the opening had glimpsed where he was headed.

“This way,” Candace yelled as he reached the top of the stairs.

He ran into her apartment. She threw a bolt lock into place in less than a second. Then she raced to what looked like a jewelry box and pulled out a 9-millimeter Beretta, matte black and wholly menacing. While he watched, she popped the clip, checked the load, and jammed it back in. Then she shocked him further by pulling two spare clips from the “jewelry” box.

“Over here,” she said, setting up behind an antique oak armoire.

She was rapidly turning Ruhi’s gallant notions of rescuing her on their head. He couldn’t have been more grateful. Guns? He wasn’t raised with guns. But he was fortunate, he realized, to have ended up next to a farm girl who appeared more than competent with semiautomatic weaponry. Maybe that’s what they did on dates out there in farm country — went shooting. Who knows? Rural America could have been Pluto, as far as he was concerned.

“The first time someone touches that door,” Candace vowed, “I’m putting a bullet through the top of it. They do it again, I’m lowering my aim. These babies penetrate.”

She reminded him of those Korean grocers in Los Angeles, back in the ’92 riots, who had saved their stores by fighting off mobs of looters with carbines. Ruhi had been a kid, but he remembered the video like it was yesterday.

“I thought you just got here from Indiana,” he said. She looked and sounded like she’d been running a crew where times were tough and gunplay plentiful. Which, as it turned out, was true:

“From Indiana via guard duty at the embassy in Kabul.”

“No kidding?”

She nodded, but her eyes were on the door because someone was smashing the hallway fire extinguisher through the top panel, and gunshots plowed into the lock. But you needed more than a couple of bullets to knock out a strong bolt.

As soon as the red canister reappeared, she fired, as promised, into the lintel. But a half second later, someone bashed an even bigger hole with the extinguisher, and a hand came through the opening, searching blindly for the handle. They heard hellacious shouting and swearing in the hallway and pounding on the door.

Candace shook her head and rested her shooting hand on the edge of the armoire.

What?

Ruhi was sure she’d lost her nerve. He reached for the gun, figuring one of them needed to pull the trigger.

“No!” Candace snapped.

“Sorry.” He backed off.

“Stop,” she yelled toward the door, “or I’ll shoot you.”

The threat didn’t discourage the guy — or he failed to hear her amid the pandemonium. He tried the handle, and then groped blindly for the lock. A second later, he found it.

Candace squinted and fired twice. The first bullet grazed his arm; the second tore through the back of his hand and buried itself in a thick horizontal board in the middle of the door.

The guy’s screams and profanities filled the room. He tried to jerk his arm out of the opening, catching his sleeve on a jagged edge of shattered panel long enough for Ruhi and Candace to get a good look at the wound. It was a couple of inches below his wrist. Then his hand disappeared and they heard the mob thundering down the stairs, shouts and threats receding as they raced away.

Candace immediately rushed to the side of the door, holding her pistol in both hands with the muzzle pointed to the ceiling. She wheeled and aimed through the opening. Ruhi braced himself for the worst. She held her fire.

“You’re not going out there, are you?” he asked.

Candace shook her head. “Not right now.” She never moved her eyes from the opening when she spoke. Her soft countenance had vanished, replaced by a rigid, determined look. Now Ruhi had no difficulty imaging her performing guard duty in Kabul. Or leading a platoon in Afghanistan’s notorious Korangel Valley, for that matter.

Who is she?

“Is there any way I can help?” he asked.

She shook her head. “But I can’t spend the night in this place. Look at that.”

Candace nodded at the ruined door. Blood splatters darkened the area near the handle. Big drips spotted the hardwood floor.

“You’re more than welcome to stay in my place.”

She gave Ruhi a skeptical look that he had seen on the faces of other women.

“I don’t mean that,” he protested. “I’ll sleep on my couch.”

“I’ll consider it,” she replied.

But she was still staring at the hallway, as if she didn’t believe it was actually empty.

“Get off me,” Emma mumbled. “Get off me.”

It felt like Payton’s mouth was pressing down on her — again. On the sidewalk! And there were sirens, but when she opened her eyes it wasn’t Payton at all. It was blurry, but she was pretty sure an African American guy was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Except he wasn’t using his lips, not directly. He had some plastic thing over them.

Whoa. What’s going on?

“What are you doing?” she managed as the plastic thingy fell away.

“You’re going to be all right, young lady.” Now the guy was picking her up and moving quickly with her in his arms.

All right?

That’s when the pain returned — with a vengeance. Her eyes and the insides of her nose and mouth felt burned. So did her lungs.

Just as she took inventory of her agony, she was flopped onto a gurney with folding legs and shoved like a pizza into the oven of the ambulance.

A sweaty white guy dripped on her as he placed an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, and offered the same solace as the African American: “You’re going to be all right.” Drip-drip. Except he added, “Hang in there.”

Hang in there? Emma’s thoughts were a muddle, but Hang in there? Didn’t that really mean that you might not hang in there? You might frickin’ die?

She didn’t want to die, but passing out right about now would be really nice because her throat and nose and eyes hurt like hell.

Emma glanced to her left and saw that she wasn’t the only injured one in the ambulance. Sitting strapped onto a jump seat was a skateboarder from her homeroom. He was holding his arm, which was bent kind of funny, and looked like he was in grievous pain. He’d wrapped his other arm around his board, as if worried that one of the paramedics would make off with it. His good hand held a phone. He tried it, shook his head, then turned his gaze to Emma. His eyes skipped down her body quickly, growing big as Dunkin’ Donuts.

Why? she wondered.

Tentatively, she reached down and found her short skirt hiked up to her hips.

Oh, no. My panties.

And not just any underpants; that was the really embarrassing part. She’d been in such a rush that she’d worn some funky old ones she’d found under the corner of the bed: Dora the Explorer. They were a joke. A joke! Last Christmas her mom had given them to her as a stocking stuffer.

The humiliation. The scandal. Dora the Explorer underwear — in high school! Emma could have screamed, but it hurt too much. She tried to wriggle her skirt down. Couldn’t manage it. But a female EMT, whom she hadn’t noticed, leaned into view and gave her hem a businesslike tug. The guy from homeroom looked away.

Wait, he had his cell phone out. Did he take a… picture?

Phones aren’t working, remember, she told herself, giving herself a moment’s reprieve. But then she wondered: Maybe the phones don’t work. Maybe the Net doesn’t. But the camera? That’s an “internal function,” as her mother would put it.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

She glanced at him. He was looking at her once more, but her face this time. And he was pretty damn cute.

Lana bolted from the massive NSA building and ran to her car, desperate to get home to check on Emma. Deputy Director Holmes had made sure that she was given a fuel allotment at the Fort Meade pumps, now powered by generators.

That put Lana back on surface streets within fifteen minutes, where traffic had lightened considerably. People had either fled their homes and businesses, or hunkered down for the duration — whatever that might turn out to be. Horrifyingly enough, Holmes had said that widespread power outages could, in reality, persist for months.

The nationwide blackout was scarcely four hours old, and even as she had conferred with Holmes and the others, disaster reports arrived from two Gulf Coast ports where supertankers, fully loaded with oil, had collided. And a container ship bound for China had crashed into the north pilings of the Golden Gate Bridge. The destruction had been well planned.

Panic had gripped the nation so quickly that it astounded her. All morning, reports were filtering in of widespread looting in more than a dozen metropolitan areas, including Washington itself, and in suburban towns with staid reputations. Gripping fear clearly knew few borders or socioeconomic barriers. And there was no way for the president, a consummate communicator, to speak to the American people: another first.

Besides, what could he say? Lana wondered as she sped onto the Beltway.

With a kinetic attack, Congress would be rushing to declare war, granting the commander in chief the right to bomb, invade, and absolutely level opponents who had inflicted even a tenth as much damage to the country. One hundredth as much: Look at 9/11. But with physical weapons — missiles, bombs, bullets — you knew who had attacked even as the weaponry took its toll. That hadn’t always been true — especially with terrorism — but in the twenty-first century it had been all but impossible for a country to escape responsibility for wide-scale violence directed against its enemies. Fighting a cyberwar, though, was like trying to tackle fog. There was nothing to hold on to, or even see. Nothing you could pound to rubble.

Lana made good time but passed so many fires that she felt certain the attackers had planned to maximize the visual impact of their otherwise invisible electronic firepower. The rising columns of smoke looked like the iconic photographs of Baghdad during the U.S. invasion.

The first Bethesda exit was still several miles away, but she saw thick black clouds filling the sky from the Amtrak — Norfolk Southern crash. Then, as she neared the beleaguered town, she caught grim glimpses of almost a mile of freight and passenger cars burning.

She planned to take an exit ramp one town past Bethesda, if she could, and loop around to her house. But she came to a crawl quickly as flaggers in orange vests directed all four lanes of traffic into one. It was the first semblance of traffic control that she’d seen since the church choir had held back cars near the train collision. She thought those kids should receive a presidential commendation of some sort, or at least front-page attention in the Post.

Lana didn’t know why she’d been squeezed into a single lane until she moved close enough to see that the ones to her right had been turned into a staging area. Bodies, neatly bagged in black plastic and lined up next to one another, were loaded into troop transport trucks — even as more of the dead were off-loaded from smaller Army vehicles.

Exits were blocked for another three miles. Then she spent forty-five teeth-grinding minutes navigating bottlenecked traffic; drivers, she guessed, who had plans similar to her own.

As she neared her house, the radio suddenly came alive. She thought, Oh, thank God! believing the outage was over—finally—and the attack withdrawn. But the invaders — that’s how she thought of them, even if they couldn’t be seen — had taken over the airwaves. A monotonic computer voice delivered a message:

“We are communicating to the American people directly. Not to your leaders. You are under attack. Count your blessings that we are not using bombs. We are more humane than your leaders. We are using your own technology to make your lives difficult…”

Difficult? Try deadly, asshole.

“We demand that the American people tell their leaders to remove U.S. military forces from its seven hundred and fifty foreign bases. Send home all your ships, tanks, fighter jets, bombers, and service people. Remove all your missiles. Stop all your invasions. Stop all your cyberattacks on foreign powers.

“This is your only hope, Americans. If your country does not return its forces to its own borders, we will burn you to the ground. Look around. Do not doubt our ability to turn you to ash. Look at what we are doing to you today.”

The message began to run again. It was on an NPR station, clearly powered up for this sole purpose. Lana figured the attackers had long ago inserted a “trapdoor,” software that allowed them to take control of the airwaves today.

On the third listening, she found only two noteworthy usages in the text: “blessings,” used idiomatically in “Count your blessings,” and the threat to burn the country to the ground, which suggested that the attackers’ aims did not include a complete conflagration — yet.

“Blessings,” she thought, certainly could be used by a secular entity, but more likely hailed from a religious person.

Or people who want to make it sound like it came from the mouth of a believer.

North Korea? she asked herself. The message had the crazy menace of the “Supreme Leader,” or whatever antic title the latest one had taken. And the North Koreans had been busy building a cyberarsenal — and using it: On July 4, 2009—Happy Birthday, America—Unit 121, reputedly North Korea’s slickest cyberattack team, with upward of a thousand warriors, had hacked into classified information on more than 1,350 hazardous chemical sites in the U.S. Some of those sites contained chlorine, a gas used to devastating effect in World War I.

That’s right — the chlorine in New Jersey. Deputy Director Holmes had told them that there were already releases of the deadly gas from chemical plants in the Garden State.

But after she made that unnerving connection, she reminded herself that releases of chlorine gas hardly nailed down the North Koreans as the culprits. There were numerous cyberwarriors in scores of countries—including our own, she reminded herself — capable of launching a new and very different world war.

Still, if you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, you’re a goddamn duck, and North Korea had already attacked the U.S., so it was not difficult to imagine that country doing it again. Moreover, Lana could not help but suspect the Stalinist state because of its underlying message in 2009: The great America is vulnerable to the mighty North Korea.

The subtext was not a complete exaggeration: To pull off its 2009 coup, Unit 121 had turned 166,000 computers into robots, or “botnets,” as they were called in the trade. The very word made Lana shake her head. Basically, it meant that the North Koreans transformed vast numbers of computers into zombies that carried out their commands.

Most people, including Lana, had experienced inexplicable slowdowns in the functioning of their desktops or laptops. Sometimes that was because a hacker had hijacked some of the devices’ power. It was agonizing to accept that today’s attack might have harnessed much of the country’s own computer power — and then turned it on itself. Roughly speaking, she thought it was like putting a pistol into someone’s hand, pointing it at his head, then using his own strength to pull the trigger.

The North Koreans had surely sharpened their cyberwarfare skills since the end of the century’s first decade. Could they pull off an attack of today’s magnitude? She looked at the smoky skies and knew the answer was a terrifying “maybe.”

Those were her thoughts as she pulled into her driveway. Without pausing, she pressed the automatic garage-door opener, and then tossed it onto the passenger seat in disgust.

She ran to the front door, finding it unlocked, which infuriated her: When is Emma going to learn to lock up around here?

“Emma?” she shouted, once inside. “I’m home.”

No response. She charged from room to room, stricken with fear when she saw that her daughter had left the house.

After double-checking, she raced outside, looking up and down the block.

It’s a ghost town.

She hurried back to her car, planning to drive over to check with Amy Burton, one of Emma’s closest friends. If her daughter wasn’t there, then she would troll the streets. And then what? The police stations and hospitals, much as she didn’t want to allow for those darker possibilities.

As she closed the car door, the old gent from across the street — the guy she’d seen in his bathrobe a few hours ago — came rushing out of his house, fully dressed this time and waving his arms.

She jumped out of the car, realizing, as he hurried up with his eyes on her blood-smeared top, that she still hadn’t changed. He panted loudly, bending forward to hold his thighs for support.

Her first thought, admittedly uncharitable, was Please don’t die before you tell me what happened to Emma.

“She collapsed,” he gasped, sounding as if he might fall over as well. “Your girl, over there.” He pointed to the sidewalk down the street. She looked, but there was no sign of Emma. “I mean when the ammonia cloud passed over us.”

“What?” Then Lana remembered Holmes mentioning the crashed ammonia tanker and the evacuation order for within a mile of the tracks.

“But — but,” her neighbor sputtered, “they were warning everyone to get inside and were right there with an ambulance. Really, I didn’t even have time to get their attention.” His breathing had calmed. Lana’s chest, though, felt as tense as barrel staves.

“Was she okay?”

“I know she was alive. The cloud passed over us quickly, and they administered mouth-to-mouth. I could see from my window.”

“Do you know where they took her?”

He shrugged. “Maybe Suburban? They have a trauma center.”

“I was just there this morning, about eight thirty,” Lana said, opening her car door.

“This was later, closer to ten o’clock. They gave a lot of warnings. I don’t know how your girl missed them.”

“I’ve got to get going.”

He shooed her off. “I’ll have her in my prayers.”

As soon as she cranked the ignition, the radio started replaying “A Message to America,” or whatever inanity they were calling it. She swore cathartically as she switched off the dial.

It was impossible to find a parking spot within five blocks of Suburban. Lana grabbed her bag, strapped it across her chest, and took off running. As she neared the hospital entrance, she felt faint from all her rushing around, and remembered that she hadn’t eaten since this morning.

She forced herself to walk and pulled an energy bar from her bag, all but inhaling half of it before deciding that she’d better save the rest. It was not like they had a big supply of food at home.

When she saw people waiting eight deep at the hospital’s information desk, she pulled out her NSA laminate to try to look official, despite her worn appearance, and walked the corridors on her own.

No one stopped her. Every hospital employee was clearly in triage mode, and every hallway was crowded with beds and gurneys, IV stands and chairs — and suffering patients.

She came across Tanesa and Shawn up on the second floor. His leg was in a cast that extended from midthigh down to his toes, the plaster already blazoned with a couple of green Sharpie “get well” greetings. An odd bit of normalcy for such a bizarre and distressing day.

“You’re back!” Tanesa exclaimed with a wide smile. “You really made it back here.” She hugged Lana. “He’s doing okay,” she volunteered, nodding at Shawn. “They said his bones had clean breaks.” She nudged him. “Do you remember—”

“Sure,” he interrupted, beaming at Lana. “You got me here before the big line formed.” He reached out with both of his bandaged hands, and she hugged him, too.

“I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better,” Lana said, “but my daughter was exposed to ammonia from an overturned tanker car and might be here.”

“Upstairs,” Tanesa said, taking her hand. The girl turned to Shawn. “I’m going to show her where they took the ammonia people.”

“Yes, go,” Shawn said, looking concerned.

Tanesa rushed Lana toward the stairs. “They’re not running the public elevators. Saving power.”

“Smart.”

“I heard they brought in a dozen people who’d breathed in some of that stuff,” Tanesa said.

“Were they okay?”

“Don’t you worry,” Tanesa said as they stepped from the stairwell. “They’re amazing in this place.”

The third floor was less crowded than the first two levels. Lana spotted Emma almost immediately in a room with three other patients.

“How are you?” she asked as she rushed to her daughter’s side.

Emma’s eyes glistened with salve, and she spoke so softly that Lana had to lean close to her lips. “Sore throat. Gave me painkillers. Not supposed to talk.”

Lana held her girl’s face in her hands, marveling over finding her alive and intact. She wanted to claw apart the people who had done this to her kid.

Tanesa leaned in and said, “I’m going to leave you two.”

“Not before I introduce you,” Lana said, regaining her composure. After the formality, Lana told Emma how Tanesa and her friends had saved her life and the lives of many other drivers.

“Wow,” Emma mouthed.

“I’m going to run back down to Shawn,” Tanesa said, “and let you two have some space.”

“Thanks so much for your help,” Lana said to the young woman.

“Back atcha,” Tanesa volleyed, heading out the door.

Lana stayed by Emma’s bedside, providing sips of water all day. When the girl fell asleep at about four, she raced over to CyberFortress, but Jeff Jensen and the others had no news; even their contacts remained in the dark.

That night Lana slept in Emma’s room, and didn’t awake till almost seven a.m. A stocky nurse checked on Emma and the other patients, as he had during the night.

“She’s doing well,” he whispered to Lana; Emma was still sleeping. “She was very lucky,” he went on. “Paramedics literally saw her fall down and were right there. She might not be doing so great if they hadn’t been.”

Lana nodded, gripped once more by a raw anger that she’d never before known. The term “mama bear” took on a whole new meaning for her.

She asked about the protocol for ammonia inhalation victims.

“We’re going to release her in a little bit. She should take liquids, nothing solid, until the burns heal. Her burns aren’t bad, but they’re internal, so food would definitely make her uncomfortable. We’re guessing she’ll be feeling a lot better in a few days.”

“Is there a doc I can talk to?”

The nurse shook his head. “I’m sorry, but you would not believe what we’re dealing with. Your girl has a head cold compared to what we’re seeing down in trauma.”

About ten minutes after he left, Emma awakened. As Lana helped her daughter climb out of bed to use the bathroom, her phone rang. For what had been such a common occurrence, it sounded extraordinary, almost miraculous.

She got Emma settled quickly and answered it. Donna Warnes from Holmes’s office was calling. Power had returned across the country exactly twenty-four hours — to the second — after the grid went down. The deputy director of NSA wanted Lana to come to Fort Meade as soon as possible.

Then Donna delivered the big news: Congress would be convening within the hour. There was talk of declaring war. But there was a huge obstacle: With the country bleeding, burning — and with thousands dead and thousands more dying — no one, not even America’s finest military minds, knew where to point the guns.