The Prince of Risk

74

Building Six.

Zero hour.

Magnus Lee hurried along the corridor on the fifteenth floor (belowground) of the secret installation. There were no company signs hanging from the ceiling. There was only one room, and it was designated with a T, for Troy. Two guards stood outside. Seeing Lee, they snapped to attention. Their reward was a perfunctory nod and a grunt.

Lee entered the operations center. Only four men were present. They sat side by side in front of computers and monitors. Each man held advanced degrees in computer science, mathematics, and statistics. They were the best of the best, the smartest of the smart, spotted by watchers at the country’s finest universities and snatched away to work on behalf of their people. There was no greater honor. They had other skills, too, and these skills were not taught at universities. They were the nation’s best hackers, and therefore the world’s.

Lee sat down in a chair at the rear of the room. There was a word for people who possessed the ability to do so much with so little. That word was super-empowered. Lee liked the sound of it. Of course, it helped if you had the might and the resources of an entire country behind you.

A digital clock broadcast the time in minutes and seconds on one wall. Less than eighteen hours remained before the key was inserted. A giant screen covered the wall facing him.

Lee watched as a simulation of the attack was broadcast. The first target had never been a subject of debate. As Troy had come into being and Lee and his assistants at Watersmark and Oak Leaf and all the other sponsors had begun to acquire stakes in so many companies across so many industries, it was always clear that the U.S. financial system would be their mark. In no other area did the Americans hold such a vast superiority to China. China’s heavy industry was the equal of America’s, as was its energy sector, its computer sector, its transportation, and soon even its military. But as a financial center, China lagged far behind. Daily, the world followed the fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NASDAQ, even the VIX, with bated breath. No one gave two hoots about the Shanghai Exchange. Shanghai was a second-rate market, fit for gamblers who burned joss and said a prayer while closing their eyes and throwing a dart at the stocks page.

It was not enough for China to succeed-America must fail.

And so tomorrow, when the key was inserted and the door finally opened, America would fail.

First to fall would be the New York Stock Exchange, or more specifically, its proprietary trading platform. The Flash Crash had been a taste of the chaos to come. For years i3 had been secretly decrypting the trading strategies employed by America’s most important investment banks. All were clients of the Exchange. All traded hundreds of millions of shares each day. Lee would use this knowledge to corrupt these strategies. Once the firewall was breached, a virus would infect the Exchange’s trading software, causing a wholesale meltdown the likes of which had never been seen.

An order to buy a thousand shares would read as an order to buy a hundred thousand. An order to sell fifty thousand shares at $40 would read as fifty thousand at $35. The discrepancy would trigger complex program trading orders to buy or sell hundreds of thousands of shares at a time. Perplexed, the software would no longer know how to match proper buy and sell orders. Order imbalances would multiply. The Dow Jones index would fall five thousand points in minutes, and when the Exchange’s built-in circuit breakers failed to arrest the decline, the index would fall further, until trading would be shut down altogether. London, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, and Tokyo would follow. No trading platform was safe. For all the exchanges were interconnected. Once the virus infected one, it would naturally seek out another and another. Pandemonium would ensue.

From the Exchange, the virus would seek out the giant data centers where records of every trade and transaction completed were stored on state-of-the-art servers. The New York Stock Exchange had recently built a new, ultrasecure facility in Mahwah, New Jersey, but it kept backups in Ohio and England. What crippled Mahwah would cripple Ohio and London. All would be compromised in seconds. Data would be erased wholesale. Efforts to reconstruct an accurate financial picture ante cyberbellum would be met and neutralized.

That was only the beginning.

From the data centers, the virus would travel to clients of the Exchange themselves. To banks, insurance companies, trading houses, credit card companies, and then to their clients. Everywhere, the virus would seek out data and destroy it.

The permutations were endless. For the virus was written to move continually upstream. To use the first target to find the second, and so on ad infinitum.

All would know that the crash was the result of an error in the trading platform. No matter. Trust would be compromised. Billions of dollars lost. Within hours, all commerce would cease. Economic Armageddon would ensue.

Still, it would not be enough.

On top of all this would be the physical attack. The ordinary citizen did not understand cyberwar. A computer virus was not tangible. It was a concept, ethereal by nature. It meant nothing.

Ordinary citizens needed blood and guts and bombs and rubble to know they were under attack. They needed to see the faces of the dead, the anguish of the survivors, the rage of the violated, and the tears of orphans. They needed to feel unsafe, insecure and at risk.

They needed to feel in danger.

Only then would they understand.

9/11 was a good beginning, but it did not go far enough. Stock prices plummeted. The Exchange closed for a week. But when it reopened trading continued as if nothing had happened. America was bruised, but came back stronger than ever. Tomorrow, China would land the decisive blow and complete the mission to dethrone the United States as the financial and economic capital of the world.

It was not enough for China to succeed-America must fail.

All this Magnus Lee saw played upon the screens in front of him. Step by step, victim by victim, country by country.

And when the virus had done its worst and all seemed lost, Lee himself would call the American president. He would volunteer China’s services to locate the virus, kill it, and restore the lost financial records. For no one had a safer, more secure, more stable platform than the Chinese. No one had foreseen such an attack and taken preemptive measures. No one had guessed its adversaries’ motives, means, and methods.

No one except the Chinese.

America’s “old friend.”

There would be no calls for the yuan to be revalued. If the Chinese preferred a weak yuan to bolster their export sector, they were welcome to it. If Chinese-made products resembled those of their American competitors a bit too much, nothing would be said. If a breach of a defense contractor’s most sophisticated weapons systems was traced to a Chinese computer, the discussion would be made behind doors and without acrimony.

America knew how to be grateful.

The attack wasn’t about bringing down America permanently.

It was about control.