The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building occupies an entire trapezoid-shaped city block between the wide eight-lane dual carriageway that is Pennsylvania Avenue to the south, E Street NW to the north and 9th and 10th Streets NW to the east and west respectively. The southern entrance of the vast structure lies on the wide and imposing Pennsylvania Avenue which leads directly to the White House a few hundred metres further west, or to the Capitol to the east, but Morgan stepped out of the northern end of the building onto E Street, somewhat in the manner of a person leaving by the tradesman’s entrance.
A sudden cacophony of blaring horns drew his attention to the E Street and 10th Street traffic light-controlled intersection. Only the traffic lights weren’t controlling the junction, because power to them had obviously failed, resulting in a snarl-up of angry drivers trying to make their way across the intersection, none willing to give way and most of them, by the sound of it, venting their obvious fury through the audible medium of their car horns. He looked the other way, to the 9th Street junction, and saw a similar, but not quite so noisy, exchange of views taking place.
He already knew that that area of Washington D.C. was usually busy with cars and tour coaches rather than pedestrians, most Americans being reluctant to walk more than a few hundred yards if there was some form of motorised vehicle they could use instead, but there were far more people on the sidewalks than he had previously seen in that vicinity. They might reasonably have been described as pedestrians, but most of them weren’t walking anywhere, just standing around in small groups, talking and gesticulating. He guessed that they probably worked in some of the nearby buildings and had moved outside because whatever electric or electronic equipment they were using had ceased functioning. As he watched, the E Street and 10th Street traffic lights flickered back into life and then almost immediately shut down again, presumably as another generator came online and then almost as quickly some breaker somewhere tripped because of an overload and the feed was shut down.
In 2003, what became known as the North-east Blackout, which began because of a software bug in a computerised alarm system in a power company in Akron, Ohio, progressed to surges and outages and then cascaded into a loss of power in parts of eight American states. The blackout directly affected some 45 million Americans and about a further 10 million people in Ontario. The lack of power contributed to roughly one hundred fatalities and affected everything from mains water systems when the pumping system power supplies were cut, to rail services, oil refineries, gas station forecourts where petrol and diesel pumps stopped working and led to long queues of vehicles, television systems and general communications, as well as domestic heating, lighting, air conditioning and other utilities, all of which either shut down or suffered outages. Even industries and businesses which had backup generators suffered, because although the blackout only lasted about eight hours some of those generators ran out of fuel within that time.
Morgan guessed that what DC was experiencing was far more localised than that event, with a much smaller affected area and population. But it was, he was sure, only the start of the threat. Looking at the gathering crowds, he also wondered if whatever attack was planned involved something like napalm or some other chemical that would have a bigger effect on an exposed population rather than people still inside buildings. Maybe that was the reason for the blackouts.
He shivered slightly at that thought and almost unconsciously looked up to stare at the sky, or what he could see of it from the bottom of the concrete canyon in which he was standing, searching for danger or anything that shouldn’t be there. Then he pulled out his mobile phone, checked the screen to confirm that the network was up – during the North-east Blackout mobile providers had suffered outages – then dialled a number that he knew almost as well as his own.
‘I’m just about to pour my second cup of coffee of the morning, Ben, so you’ve caught me at a good time. What’s on your mind?’
‘Good morning, Natasha. Everything okay at your end?’
‘My end is fine, if you’re talking about where I’m working, rather than something more personal. Why are you asking?’
‘DC is getting hit with power outages,’ Morgan replied. ‘How about Maryland?’
‘As far as I know, the No Such Agency hasn’t had a problem, so maybe our supplier is unaffected. On the other hand, this place has massive backup generators and if there was a power cut it’s quite possible we wouldn’t even notice. Are you thinking this is enemy action?’
‘I’d be amazed if it wasn’t. But obviously there must be more to it than just a few lights going out. Any joy with the tracking idea we talked about?’
‘Oddly enough, yes, because we both know how rare it is for one of your ideas to actually pan out. You gave me a specific location where an unregistered mobile was located and the date and time when another unregistered mobile called it. So I gave one of my guys back at Cheltenham the job of identifying and tracking the calling mobile, because you figured that was the one being used by the person in charge, and to start a tally of its activity and its location and to monitor the calls and messages. You probably won’t be entirely surprised to hear that most of the time that mobile has been switched off, which suggests to me that you were right: the person using it is the one giving the orders rather than receiving them. He only switches it on when he needs to tell somebody something.
‘As far as locations are concerned, it pops up all over the place and at very different times, usually in and around DC, but we’ve also had hits in Damascus – that’s the one just north of DC, not the city half a world away in Syria, before you ask, a district called Bel Air near Baltimore and one out at a city called Syracuse up in New York State. My man also did historical checking, running back through the records of the service provider to see if it was used before making that call to the mobile. It was, but again the results were the same: only occasional usage in DC, Damascus, Bel Air and Syracuse.’
‘And did your man also—’ Morgan interrupted.
‘I hadn’t finished. Whoever this person is, he doesn’t seem to have many friends, because he’s only ever called six other numbers, and to save you exercising your limited allocation of brain cells, I’ll tell you where they were located. They were all mobiles, three of them in DC, one in Damascus, one in Bel Air and one in Syracuse. To me, that makes it look like we’re dealing with a small number of people located in different places and probably tasked with doing different jobs as part of a single operation. Significantly, none of those mobiles are registered and all of them have been switched on almost all the time, only going off the network between late evening and early in the morning. If you give me a few minutes, I’ll bung the data file over to you now.’
‘Thanks,’ Morgan said. ‘Can you also run a check in real time and find out if those mobiles are switched on right now and where they are? And if your man back in Cheltenham managed to run an active intercept I’d like to hear anything he recorded from any of the target numbers.’
‘I’ll see what he’s got and you’ll have it pretty much immediately.’
‘Now, I’ve also managed to fall out with the hierarchy of the Bureau in a fairly big way, so I’m kind of on my own and this is getting urgent.’
‘Another set of official toes you’ve trodden on, eh?’
‘More like stamped on, really, repeatedly and wearing hobnail boots. I’m definitely not on their Christmas card list any more. Not that I was in the first place.’
‘Typical of you, Ben. Right, you should have the file in the next couple of minutes. Keep me in the loop and try not to piss off any other branches of American law enforcement. If we’re going to wrap this up, we’re going to need help. Lots of help. And it’ll need to be help with badges, body armour and big guns.’