1130 EST
Brighton Beach
Brooklyn, New York
“I’m coming in with you,” Jessica Foley said as she parked the car at a meter under the old metal of the elevated train tracks.
“The hell you are,” Jimmy Foley told his wife. “I don’t want them to know who you are, that you even exist.”
“My existence is not really a state secret, Jimmy. This is not negotiable. Dr. Rathstein said you shouldn’t even leave the apartment this weekend. Remember, hotshot, you were in a hospital in California when you woke up yesterday. I don’t want you passing out by yourself in the middle of some Russian mafia lair in Little Odessa,” she said, grabbing and squeezing his hand.
“I knew I shoulda taken a cab,” he said, and then laughed and leaned over and kissed her. Despite the residual anesthetics in his system, he had had no difficulty doing that and a lot more during the night before. “All right. Take your ring off. Your name is Susan Connor and you are my partner at the Intelligence Analysis Center and you will let me do all the talking.”
“I thought you said Susan was African-American?” Jessica asked.
“It will confuse them, if they even know that much,” Jimmy said, getting out of the car. He had woken up early and waited until 0730 before calling his old NYPD partner. Detective Vin DeCarlo was up, making pancakes for his three kids and letting his wife sleep in, as he did every Saturday. Unfortunately, he was also going to take the kids to the Rangers game and could not join Jimmy on his outing to Brighton Beach. His information about what was going on in the Ismailovskaya, the Russian mob, was priceless. He had stayed on the Russian crime beat when Jimmy had left for his year in Washington.
With the bandages over his left eye, Detective Jimmy Foley knew he did not look as formidable as he wanted to. He had, however, worn his best suit. He just hoped that Jessica did not look too much like his wife. They crossed the busy street, dodging cars, to the Pushkin restaurant, where Gregori Belov had agreed to meet for an early lunch. The Russian sat alone on the banquette in the semicircular corner booth, among the overstuffed pillows. He had a thick head of silver-white hair, broad shoulders, and a florid face. He wore a black suit and white shirt with no tie. Jessica guessed he was in his early fifties. “For a mobster’s lair, it has a lot of lace and tassels, and red,” Jessica said sotto voce as they moved through the nearly empty room.
“Dobriy den! James, James, back from Washington so soon, and with a new partner? Much nicer,” Belov bellowed as they approached his throne. “Rada tebya videt. They don’t have good Palmeni or Sacivi in Washington?” He took Jessica’s hand and kissed it delicately. “Gregori Belov. Ochinprivatna.”
“Delighted,” Jessica said, blushing. “Susan Connor, Foley’s partner.” It was only half a lie, she thought.
“Foley and Connor—sounds like the NYPD union,” Belov said as they both settled in on his left.
“Mr. Belov, thank you for meeting on such short notice. Spasiba,” Jimmy started.
“Mr. Belov. Mr.?” the Russian said, opening the bottle of vodka on the table. “Pyatizvyozdnaya, my favorite—it means ‘with five stars.’ The honey in it is good for my throat. Pazhaltsa!” He poured them each a four-finger shot.
“Choot-choot,” Jimmy said, trying in vain to get less in his glass.
“Na zdarOv’ye,” Belov toasted, and then, looking at Jessica, “Za vas.”
“It means ‘to you,’” Jimmy explained.
“You do not speak Russian, lovely lady? Oh, please forgive my rudeness,” Belov said, bowing his head. “English only from now on.” He downed the vodka. Jessica sipped some, but Jimmy emptied his painted shot glass. “Miss Connor, do you know that Jimmy learned his Russian in the Marines? He was supposed to learn Arabic, but the class was full and they had all of these Russian instructors left over. Monterey, yes, James?”
“Monterey, yes, Gregori. Defense Language Institute. Again, thank you for the meeting,” Jimmy tried again.
“Vinny DeCarlo calls me at eight-thirty in the morning and says you must see me or the world will end. Of course, I see you. The understanding that you helped to broker here in Brooklyn is holding. Street crime is down. The Bratva, if there were a Bratva, is not selling drugs here and has provided useful leads on others who do, the Mexicans, Colombians.” A waiter had been standing quietly, holding menus and a wine list. “Jimmy, if I recall, wants the borscht and then the Palmeni. So do I,” Belov told the waiter. “And caviar, of course.”
“Well, then, make it three,” Jessica added quickly.
“And the mukuzani,” he said, rejecting the wine list and turning again to Jessica. “Georgian wine, but dry, velvety, almost smoky.” He looked back at Jimmy and his bandages. “So I know you want to get right down to business, but I have been good and have not asked—so first, who poked you in the eye?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out, Gregori.”
“Ah, so this is personal. Well, then, I will be even more helpful.” Belov smiled at Jessica, then at Jimmy. “How can I help? Who can I kill? Just kidding, of course.”
“The word is that with Dimitri Yellin missing, you have, shall we say, adopted the Ukrainian chapter?” Jimmy asked.
“They came to me. They knew I am not responsible for Dimitri’s disappearance. My daughter married his son, Sergei. We do not compete. We had different sales districts, different product lines. We watch each other’s backs. Sergei asked me for help keeping his group from splitting up. The Georgian, Karinshasvili, tried to recruit some of them.” Belov spoke quickly, in bursts, like a Kalashnikov on full automatic.
“I know it wasn’t you, Gregori, but what did happen to Dimitri?” Jimmy asked.
“I have tried to find out from Sergei, of course,” Belov said, spreading the caviar on a pancake. “Dimitri had a contract with someone, a shishka. He never knew who it was, but the man paid handsomely and in gold and cash. To do the job, Dimitri had to buy things and get some people from back home. Sergei says the money left over has disappeared. The gold transferred out of their account. The vehicle carrying the cash vanished.” Belov consumed the pancake in one piece and washed it down with a vodka. “Jimmy, you said this is personal. Whatever Dimitri did for this man…Sergei is now my son, under my protection. Tell me you are not here investigating Sergei or his men.”
Jimmy Foley reached his hand across the table to Gregori Belov. “I am not here investigating Sergei or his men.” The two men shook on it. “I want the man who contracted with Dimitri Yellin, and I need him very soon, this weekend.”
The borscht arrived. “I understand what you want now, Jimmy, and how much you want it, but this weekend?”
“It is not only personal, Gregori,” Jimmy added. “A great deal depends upon it.”
Families had been drifting in, filling up the Pushkin, but none had interrupted Belov’s lunch to wish him well or pay tribute. They respected his space. Looking around at the Saturday luncheon crowd, Jessica wondered where Belov’s security was. She had lost the thread of the conversation and knew that Jimmy would never explain it to her afterward. At times it almost sounded like one of her midtown lunches trying to convince a client to do an initial public offering.
As the main course was being cleared, Belov dabbed his lips almost daintily with the linen napkin. “For me to find out what you want, I may need to spend some money, and I will certainly be running some risk,” he suggested.
“The government will be very appreciative,” Jimmy replied.
“The government? The federal government?” Belov asked. “At a high level?”
“At a very high level,” Jimmy said confidently.
“Jimmy, there is a company upstate that has been trying to sell things, food and the like, to Fort Drum, the mountain troops there. They need a long-term contract with decent margins so they can give our troops the very best.”
“I’m sure the Pentagon can be persuaded to want the very best for Fort Drum, Gregori.”
Belov signaled that he was going to push back the table. The meal was over. Four men came out from behind the red curtains, two on either side of the table. They were not waiters. Standing, Belov again kissed Jessica’s hand. “You are lucky to be with Jimmy—he will make a good father.” He then turned to the bandaged detective. “Also, Jimmy, I have a nephew in Massachusetts. He wants to resettle in Nevada. Not Novosibirsk. Da?”
Jimmy looked at the Russian mobster. “I need the information fast, Gregori. Very fast.” The men shook hands, and as the Foleys left the restaurant, their host began circulating among the tables, like the mayor of Little Odessa.
0855 PST
Las Vegas, Nevada
“I wish we hadn’t abandoned the ranch so quickly,” Packetman complained.
“We had a compromise of site security. We had no choice,” the General spit out. “Let’s get on with it. You have everything here that you had there. Explain to me how it will work. How do we unplug the electrical system?”
Above them in the darkened room were three seventy-two-inch screens, one showing a map of the western United States and Canada, the other two with a maze of lines and color-coded boxes. “So, there are three electric power zones in the country—East, West, and Texas,” Packetman explained.
“I always knew Texas was different,” the General said, staring at the diagrams.
“The Western Interconnect includes everything west of the Mississippi in Canada and the U.S., plus Baja in Mexico. It’s divided into five subzones. We are going to attack each of the five differently. Watch.” Packetman threw a Keynote briefing slide up on the middle screen. “In CBRC, California basically, we are going to cause the voltage levels to drop on the north-south bulk electrical system by giving instructions to their SCADA control system, but we will play ‘man in the middle’ and catch the signals that are sent back up to the reliability coordinator command center in Riverside. The signals we send to the center will make it look like everything is fine. Then, when the voltage gets low enough, bang, a cascading failure of the grid.”
“How did you get into the control system, if that is not a trade secret?” the General asked.
“It is, but you pay me well. Hacked the firewall between their consumer billing system and the transmission reporting. Took a while, but I’ve been inside for over a year, programmed their intrusion-detection system not to notice me,” Packetman said, and beamed.
“So California goes out. That trips everything else?” the General queried.
“Might, but just to be sure, I got into the RMRC area—that’s around here, Nevada—by putting a radio out in the desert. The power company broadcasts control instructions to some of their unmanned sites in the clear on radio frequencies, not by landline. Easy to get in by overpowering the real radio signal. And once you’re in the network, you can go anywhere. No encryption, no access authorization, no internal firewalls. They have all their generators’ turbines spinning synchronized at exactly the same speed all over the country, sixty cycles. If I change that by twenty percent, it knocks up the power fourfold. We applied a binary patch to the firmware of all the generators to override the governors that limit their speed.”
“I don’t understand a word you just said,” the General complained, towering above the seated hacker.
“We’re going to send so much power down the lines from the plants that it will fry the big transformers just outside the plants and the high-tension wires will get so hot they will droop and then melt. With one five hundred thousand–volt line disabled, two other five hundred thousand–volt lines will become overloaded and shut down. This, in turn, causes the main power artery between geographic regions to shut down. Safety systems will automatically shed load in an attempt to keep the system in balance. However, the increased demand on the generators at other electric utilities causes a ripple effect.
“Every generator on the entire grid has to be spinning at exactly the same rate, sixty hertz, before it can be connected to the grid. They have software that minimizes frequency error, and software turbine governors that prevent the spin rate from going too high. We hacked that software so some of the generators will spin so fast that they will jump right off their moorings and go crashing around the floor, damaging all their turbine blades. It will take months to repair some of them. And Siemens and GE don’t have huge warehouses of extras sitting around. It’s all Build When Bought.”
The General smiled. “That I understand. All of these little programs will start at the same moment?”
“All the executables are keyed to the power grid’s atomic clock time. It all happens at nine o’clock, in ninety seconds.” Packetman hit a stroke on his keyboard. “And we can watch it all live on their reporting system. The Saturday shift guys, they’ll freak. Let’s hope our emergency generators here work so we can watch.”
“We could have made it much worse,” the General observed. “Could have been a Monday-night rush hour in July. Could have been the entire country.”
“Yeah,” Packetman smirked, “but they’re not gonna get it back for a while. The nuclear plants especially take a long time to come back up. The blackout will go on for days, into the workweek. And if we want, it could be weeks.”
0859 PST
Electrical Reliability Coordination Center
Riverside, California
“It’s so hot for March that they’ll be turning on the air-conditioning in L.A., Phoenix, and Vegas before noon. You watch,” Danny Hubbard told his supervisor, Fran Cella, as the two sat below a fifty-foot-long wall of large computer screens. In front of them were smaller screens and a bank of switches and lights. The indicators were all in the green. The voltage level on the transmission lines showed well above the critical minimums. The indicators had been reprogrammed by Packetman never to dip, never to alarm, no matter what the incoming data actually was. The same code change had been made systemwide by one cyberbot inserted into the control network.
“Yeah, but at least it’s Saturday, so the load is light,” she said, carefully dipping her Chinese herbal chai in the dragon-covered pot of piping-hot water.
Then, at substations and transformers throughout the California and Baja electric grid, an instruction message was received in the computer code language of the supervisory control and data acquisition system: drop voltage. Each programmable box obeyed. Monitoring systems scattered throughout the state instantly noticed the entire grid’s voltage drop below safe minimums. The monitoring systems sent alarm messages to control centers: “High loading, low voltage without electrical faults on unprotected lines.” Slightly over a minute later, three different sensors in the field sent in priority messages: “Potential for cascading failures.” Packetman’s handiwork sent the messages into cyber black holes. No needles moved. No lights flashed. No Klaxons sounded.
“How much are we buying today from Pacific Northwest?” Fran asked, blowing on the cup to cool the black tea. As she spoke, the large screens abruptly went dark and the room plunged into blackness. Fran Cella leaped out of her chair, reaching for a telephone. “Son of a bitch!” she screamed as the scalding water spilled down her chest. Slowly, a few dim yellow lights came on from battery pack emergency boxes mounted on the walls. “We lost power? We did? We’re supposed to be running the grid, for Christ sakes! Danny, how’s the grid?”
The big boards had failed to come back on. Danny Hubbard was glaring at a small monitor in front of his position and rebooting his desktop computer. “I thought the center had its own backup emergency generator?” he asked as his system spun up. “We’re only on batteries.”
“We do have a generator. Supposed to test it again next month,” Fran said, hanging up the telephone. “Lines are dead. What’s your screen say?”
“It says, ‘System was improperly shut down. Data loss may have occurred.’ No fucking shit!”
At the nuclear power plants in the desert, generators went into automatic shutdown mode because of the absence of external electrical power to support their emergency systems. Regional air traffic control at Los Angeles Center, running on its emergency generator, queried aircraft whether they had enough fuel to return to Honolulu or make it to Dallas. At LAX, the tower slowed landings and began stacking aircraft in the skies over the Pacific. Under the streets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, subway trains stopped dead in darkened tunnels.
Elevators in high-rise apartment buildings and office towers froze between floors. In casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Laughlin, and Tahoe, gamblers fought over chips in dimly lit halls. At the ports in Long Beach and Oakland, giant cranes halted with shipping containers hanging in midair. At hospitals in twenty states, staff struggled with emergency generators, as nurses began shutting off patient monitors to shed load on the backup power and started trying to pry open windows for ventilation. Police moved patrol cars with lights flashing into intersections to direct traffic on surface streets, as the traffic control lights sat unresponsive.
At gas stations throughout the region, pumps stopped working. Quarter-mile-long trains with food, cars, and coal halted on tracks throughout the West as the railroad’s control system went dark. At the prisons in Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin, inmates clashed with guards attempting to put the institutions in lockdown. Pharmacies in Phoenix, Denver, and South Central Los Angeles were looted. At windowless high-rises filled with telephone switches and internet routers, batteries failed and switches crashed due to inadequate loads from backup power systems. Burglar alarms went off across the region.
Military bases in California and Colorado went on alert and rolled armored vehicles to the gates. The watch commander at LAPD headquarters ordered all off-duty officers to report in and issued the coded radio message that meant “don riot gear.”
On the beaches of Venice and Malibu, no one noticed. The volleyball continued uninterrupted.
1200 EST
Basement Conference Room 3
The West Wing, the White House
“Rusty MacIntyre will be sitting in for Sol today,” National Security Advisor Wallace Reynolds announced to the Secretaries of Defense and State. “You all know Russell, of course.” Reynolds was in jeans and a Princeton sweatshirt.
“Why does he gets Saturdays off?” Secretary of State Brenda Neyers asked, only half kiddingly. “He’s not Orthodox.”
“He’s out of town,” Reynolds said testily. “He cleared it with the President. I just wanted to get a briefing today on what we could do in cyberspace, so we understand things better when we get the briefing on all the various options Monday from the Pentagon. I don’t know about you, but I don’t get how all this stuff works. And I thought if China or someone is messing with our computer things, well, maybe we could do that kind of thing too. Tit for tat. What was it you said, Bill—bytes not bombs, or something?”
Secretary of Defense William Chesterfield nodded at a general, who pointed his finger at a colonel, who turned on the projector. A slide appeared on the wall with two words written in white on a black background: Information Warfare. The General, Major General Chuck Mann, United States Air Force, spoke: “We define Information Warfare to be those actions which we take to affect the information available to the enemy, to include leaflet drops, radio and television programming, e-mail messages, and other media. Whenever possible, our doctrine holds that the information used shall be truthful, although it can obviously be tailored to stress those things which we want the enemy to believe.
“In the 2003 liberation of Iraq, we successfully employed all of those media to send a message to Iraqi Army officers that they should not oppose us, that we were only after Saddam and his sons, they could stay in the Army, and that they should send their troops home for a while and should park their tanks and other vehicles in non-threatening formations. Many did what we asked and American lives were saved.”
Brenda Neyers coughed. “Only to be lost later because we double-crossed the Iraqi Army, fired the Iraqi Army’s officer corps, and failed to seize their weapons. We paid for that little lie for years, with the blood of our troops.”
“Brenda, please,” Wallace Reynolds chided. “There’s no need to get into all of that again. It was almost a decade ago that all of that started. Not on our watch. But, General, if I may, I thought we were going to talk about computers?”
The General looked at the Secretary of Defense, who nodded for him to answer. “Sir, I was asked to prepare a briefing on Information Warfare. Computers do play a role. We did send the Iraqi officers e-mails.”
Rusty MacIntyre saw the conversation was going nowhere fast. “Wallace, the military use the term ‘Information Warfare’ interchangeably with the phrase ‘Psychological Warfare.’ What you are interested in, they call Computer Network Attack.”
“Yes, right, Rusty. General, what can we do in this Computer Network Attack business?” Reynolds asked.
The General, still holding a small laser pointing device aimed at the screen, shifted on his feet and looked again at the SecDef, who sat poker faced. “Well, sir, that’s all restricted, but I guess I can tell you, huh? We have developed some ability, especially after the Cyber Crash of 2009, to do some offensive work. Although frankly, sir, most of our attention is on information collection, not disruption. But we could, if ordered, do some things to some countries’ air defense radar and some of their communication systems. I mean, if we had enough lead time and support from CIA, NSA, and the others.”
Wallace Reynolds sat staring at the general.
There was a brief knock on the door and a member of the Situation Room watch team entered the room and passed a folded note to MacIntyre. He realized, as he read it, that all eyes in the room were on him. He folded the paper back up and turned to Wallace Reynolds. “Other nations apparently have the ability to do more, like turn out the electrical power in half our country,” Rusty said dryly.
“What do you mean?” Secretary Neyers asked.
“All electrical power grids are down west of the Mississippi, except in Texas. That does not happen by accident,” Rusty asserted. “The attack on our cyberspace and technology that started on Sunday, by disconnecting our cyberspace from the rest of the world, and continued with attacks on some of our major labs and commercial communications satellites, probably including the assassination of the heads of our federal science agencies, has now involved the largest power blackout in American history, one hundred million Americans thrown into chaos.”
“If this is supposed to convince us to back off from the China-Taiwan dispute, I think it’s having the opposite effect on me,” the Secretary of Defense asserted.
“You don’t know that China did this,” Neyers replied.
“It wasn’t Botswana, Brenda,” Chesterfield shot back. His answer hung in the air.
Finally, Wallace Reynolds looked at Rusty MacIntyre. “How long will they be out?”
“Don’t know.”
Reynolds looked at Neyers and Chesterfield, who said nothing, then back at MacIntyre. “Can you go find out, Rusty? And while you’re out there, ask the folks on the Situation Room watch team if we have an emergency generator. Have them check it.”
1230 EST
Finneran’s Boatyard
Marsh Harbor, Abaco Island
The Bahamas
“Are you lookin’ to go to Hopetown?” the old man said from the boat. His aging face was brown, creased deeply, with white stubble sprouting here and there. “You Miss Connor? I’m Mr. Waters, Charles Waters.”
“Yes—are you here to take me across?” Susan asked, evoking a broad smile in the man. Several of his front teeth were missing. The thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler had twin battery-powered outboard motors, and the old man handled the new-looking boat as if it had been his for decades, a part of his body. He kept the speed down until he had maneuvered around the sailboats and docks in the harbor. Then, clear of Abaco Island, he opened it up for the short run across to Elbow Cay and its harbor at Hopetown. It was still winter in Washington, but in the Bahamas the temperature was in the low seventies, and Susan Connor felt the warmth of the sun as the boat bounced across the perfectly flat sea between the islands.
“Been to our ‘Islands in the Stream’ before, miss?” Waters asked.
“No, but I read the book,” she replied, trying not to show her surprise at the boatman’s Hemingway reference. “Is this the place?”
He nodded his head. “These cays. But they say the Stream is beginning to shift now because of the ice meltin’ up north.”
At the northern end of the Bahamas, Abaco and its smaller barrier islands of Elbow Cay, Guana Cay, and Man-O-War lie to the east of the Gulf Stream, in line with Fort Lauderdale. Although largely unknown in the United States, the island cluster has always been affected by the large neighboring nation. The victory of the American revolutionaries in the 1780s created the first settlers, refugee colonial Loyalists from the Carolinas. The Prohibition era brought a different kind of American, one willing to chance a run across the powerful Gulf Stream to Florida, carrying rum and Scotch. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, state and federal laws and regulations against certain types of stem-cell organ generation and genetic engineering caused some Americans to quietly convert some large villa complexes into high-tech labs and clinics.
“Still pretty shallow here,” Susan noted. She sat in the seat by the windshield to the left of the old man, looking over the side and through the clear water at the rocks and sea grasses below.
“Doesn’t get anything but shallow in these islands, not till you go out into Atlantic, other side of Elbow Cay beyond the reef,” Mr. Waters said as he drove with one hand and sipped a Red Stripe with the other. “We don’t get many sisters goin’ to Elbow or Man-O-War. They still white man’s islands.”
“Really. I didn’t know there were a lot of whites outside of Nassau,” Susan yelled back.
“They been here since they ran out the Carolinas when Georgie Wash done won the war. Inbred and all. Talk funny.” He cut the engine as they approached the mouth of a waterway leading into the interior of Elbow Cay. “Now they’re a few little hotels and cabins on Elbow Cay for tourists, but Man-O-War’s still just them original families. They make good boats out on Man-O-War and there’s a coupla big villas, but mainly its them same white-folk families that come in the seventeen hundreds.” The boat turned a corner to reveal a little crescent-shaped harbor, dominated on the right by a candy-cane-styled lighthouse and on the left by a series of short docks attached to open air bars. Even though the temperature was in the high sixties, women in tank tops and shirtless men sat at tables in the sun. They were the white tourists who had found a place off the beaten path. Rock music from one bar’s speakers bounced across the water toward the lighthouse.
“This here’s Captain Jack’s,” Mr. Waters explained as he threw a line onto the dock, “where you s’pose to be. I got your bag. Pleasure to take you across.”
Susan now saw the man who caught the rope. He was tall, broad, in a short-sleeved blue Oxford button-down and white slacks. He was black and, Susan thought immediately, handsome. “Miss Connor, Mr. Gaudium sent me. I’m Arnold Scott.” He helped her out of the boat and led her to a table under an umbrella. “I assumed you wouldn’t have eaten, so I took the liberty of ordering you some lunch. Grouper and conch fritters, fresh and locally caught.”
Over lunch, Scott kept to small talk about the islands and about himself. He said he had been told not to ask any details about Susan. She wondered what he knew. He was a graduate of Morehouse, class of 2003 ROTC. He had been out of the Army, Special Forces, almost two years. And he really enjoyed working for Dominion Commonwealth Services.
“Let’s take a walk so we can talk more about what we’re going to be doing,” Arnie Scott suggested. They left the dock bar and wandered down the dirt road lined with small, pastel-colored cottages, an old London red telephone booth and a red British Royal Mail box. There were no cars on the island and little foot traffic. Susan noticed a golf cart beside a small grocery store. Scott suggested he show her the Atlantic side and the reef. They walked through the courtyard of a small hotel, the Hopetown Lodge, past its outdoor bar, to the beach. The bright white-sand beach seemed to stretch endlessly off to the right, entirely unoccupied by bathers. An almost unnaturally fluorescent turquoise water spread out from the beach to a line of foam a few hundred yards offshore. There, the Atlantic hit the long coral reef protecting the cay.
“Kind of ironic. Ponce de Leon landed here almost exactly five hundred years ago looking for the fountain of youth. Now these guys come here seeking life-extension genes,” Scott said, shaking his head in disgust. “The lab is at the far end of Man-O-War Cay, which is the next island over in the chain. It’s a big villa, walled off, with its own dock. They usually fly the patients directly to the dock on a seaplane from Fort Lauderdale. They spend a night, maybe two. Get tested and then do the procedure.”
The March sea kept up a constant roar as it crashed on the reef a few hundred feet away.
“Arnie, exactly what do we know about the procedure?” she asked while looking out to sea.
“Only the basics. We think they add the new chromosomes to the embryo, probably in vitro. We’re hoping you find out more. However they do it, they have a high rate of success, a money-back guarantee, and no complaints that we could find.” He shook his head in disgust, “Its like that movie Gattica, where you could order up whatever added features you want in your kid. You just pay more for each addition.”
Susan stopped and sat on the sand near the water’s edge. “The ruling elite, the first wave of an entirely new genus.”
“Let’s hope they’re the first and the last,” Scott said bitterly. He continued to stand, towering above Susan.
Susan looked up at her escort. “Are you, like, a foot taller than me or what?” she asked, trying to get him to loosen up.
“Only eight inches,” Scott said, and chuckled. She thought he had a pleasant face when he was smiling, not trying to be Army guy.
“And seven years younger, and we are supposed to be married and wealthy?” Susan rattled off what she knew of their cover story from reading the folder Gaudium had left for her on his plane. “Would you believe that shit?”
“I made three hundred thousand a year for three years in Iraq. You are a partner in a major consulting firm in Boston. You got yourself a smart, rich, young stud,” Scott said as though he were only reciting the lines he had been given. “The height thing…I don’t know about that.”
“Did you make three hundred thousand a year in Iraq?” she asked.
“Hell no,” he said definitively. “I did the same thing as guys getting three hundred K working for those private firms, but I was still in the Army, ma’am—I got one-tenth of that amount.”
They walked along the empty beach away from the town. “Let’s go over how this is supposed to work and what I’m supposed to find out,” Susan asked.
“My orders are to let you satisfy yourself that there is an offshore facility creating designer babies with extra chromosomes,” Scott explained. “They bring in nine women at a time, by the way, three times a week, and they have been doing that for almost a year and a half. If you can, find out exact numbers, ideally their addresses.”
“Can’t you steal their database?” She thought she’d push a little further. “Hackers?”
“These guys are smart. Their computers aren’t connected to the internet. They don’t use wireless.” Scott stopped in the sand. “If you can, if you are alone in a room with a terminal or printer, there’s a tiny bug I’ll give you. It transmits out far enough for us to pick it up with an antenna and relay hidden in a rock we’ll place on the beach. That could set up a path to get us into their LAN.”
Susan listened and then started walking down the beach again. “And we didn’t fly in on their seaplane because…”
“They only fly in the mothers, and our story is that you wanted me to come along, wanted to relax first with a few days on the beach,” he answered, catching up with her. “They won’t let me in, but I’ll take you over to Man-O-War in the morning and walk you up the Queen’s Highway to the gate by seven-thirty tomorrow morning.”
“Queen’s Highway?” she repeated.
“It’s another sand-and-dirt path that runs from one end of the cay to the other. Their idea of a joke over on Man-O-War,” Scott said, and flashed a toothy smile. Susan was thinking what was he doing working for some private security company and what was it doing working with Gaudium? Then Susan heard herself asking Arnie a question her subconscious generated: “Does Will manage the company now or just own it?”
“Oh, I think he’s just the owner,” Scott replied. “He’s so busy with everything else he does.”
“Yes, I know. Senator George came by the winery while I was there with Will. Have you met him yet? Dynamic speaker.”
“Yes, yes, he is,” Scott enthused. “I was on his protective detail for a week and then this assignment came up.”
Susan lifted her sunglasses onto her head. “And where are the two rooms, might I ask, where the Scott couple are supposed to be spending the night?”
“Dominion has a house on Man-O-War we’ve been using for the surveillance, but I assumed you might want to stay in a hotel, so I got you a room here in the Hopetown Lodge. The boatman brought your bag there. Unless you want me to hang around, I’ll bring the boat over from Man-O-War and pick you up at seven tomorrow.”
“See you then,” Susan replied, thanking her instinct or subconscious or wherever that question about Will and the security firm had come from.
After Arnold Scott left on his boat back to Man-O-War, she walked slowly down to the water’s edge. She felt alone, out on a limb. What was she doing on an out of the way little island no one had ever heard of, by herself? She had signed up to be an analyst. But she had wanted more, to be involved, on the edge with the most important issues, crises. Now, as Rusty had done in the Islamyah crisis, she was playing it solo in the field, like an agent. She was not trained for this. She had almost been killed at Moffett Field. Even Jimmy had almost been killed at Twentynine Palms. And where had it got them? Sol had to fly off to Hong Kong, grasping at straws, trying to avoid a showdown with China. What had she done? She looked out at the surf on the reef.
Gaudium. She had found him and come to understand him, really sympathize with and appreciate him. Nonetheless, putting aside emotion, although she could not prove it yet, the analytical side of her brain was telling her there was a connection between him and the attacks. There had to be. He actually owned the security company that was protecting Senator George and had ex–Special Forces guys like Arnie Scott doing surveillance on in vitro fertilization labs. Gaudium was aware of the Man-O-War lab and, if Soxster was right, the hacker Packetman was, too. Packetman had said they were going to eliminate something. And Packetman had worked at the ranch that Jimmy had raided, the ranch from where somebody had attacked the Marines and probably the satellites, the people who were planning to kill hundreds. Shit! Was that the Hiroshima event Will had in mind?
Susan felt for her BlackBerry. Its battery still had juice. She needed to call Jimmy. She hit his speed-dial number. Nothing happened. There was no cell service on this side of Elbow Cay! She ran up the beach to the hotel. At the outdoor bar, the bartender was laughing with an American couple, handing them drinks with little umbrellas. There was a phone on the bar. It would be better to use it; her room phone might be bugged. “I’m staying here,” she gasped. “Can I use this phone to call the States?” She called Jimmy’s mobile number.
“How’s the patient?” she asked.
“Great. I just took the bandages off and I can see fine, better than before,” Jimmy said as he stared out of his apartment window in Battery Park City, zooming in on the Jersey shore. “You heard about California and the west, the blackout? Almost a hundred million people without power. They’re saying it could not have been an accident.”
“Shit, that will put even more pressure on the President to do something to somebody,” she said, walking with the cordless phone to a table near the bar.
“Find anything yet in the Bahamas?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I think so. Remember Soxster said a hacker knew about Man-O-War and how the hackers were going to penetrate something, stop something?”
“Sure, that was Packetman. I just talked to Soxster about that, because he also said Packetman wanted to attack the power grid,” Jimmy said, looking at his notes.
“Will Gaudium knew about Man-O-War, too, and it turns out that Gaudium owns a security firm that is surveilling the place here. The firm is called Dominion Commonwealth something. Can you check it out?”
“You got it,” he said, sitting down at his computer terminal. “You liking Gaudium in the attacks?” The landline phone rang and Jessica Foley answered it in the next room. Now she was waving at him, signaling that the call was for him.
“No, well, maybe, could be somehow connected.” Susan put her hand up to the mouthpiece and spoke softly. “Jimmy, remember what TTeeLer said, how they were going to kill hundreds sometime in March? Packetman says they’re going to destroy something related to Man-O-War? Jimmy,” Susan stopped and exhaled, “Jimmy, what if the hundreds they’re going to kill are the in vitro children conceived at the Man-O-War lab? They don’t have their addresses yet, but…”
Jimmy said nothing. Then: “That’s like the Bible, Suz, the Pharaoh ordering the children be slain. Passover.”
Jessica was walking the phone over to Jimmy. “It’s him,” she said, holding up a phone. “It’s Belov.”
“I’ll know tomorrow,” Susan replied. “See what Soxster can dig up and keep getting a good rest. We need you recovered.” Susan terminated the call and walked the phone back to the bar and said to the bartender, “Thanks for the phone. Do you have any Balvenie?”
In New York’s Battery Park, Jimmy Foley traded phones with his wife.
“James,” the voice on the phone began, “It’s your lunch date. I may have some answers. Can you come to the Teterboro Airport? Now?”
2030 Local Time
Hong Kong
Sol Rubenstein marveled at the city-state. It had been years since he had been to Hong Kong. Its magnificent Kai Tak island airport, connected to Central by a maze of tunnels and suspension bridges, and its skyline of architecturally stunning eighty- and hundred-story office towers were startling. Every square inch, even on the steep hills, was covered with apartment towers that Rubenstein belatedly realized were routinely fifty stories high.
The economic success of the mainland had created, in effect, two river states. Guangzhou and Hong Kong and a series of smaller cities were the Pearl River state. Shanghai and a series of lesser-known, several-million-population cities on the Yangtze made up the other river state. The upriver cities each specialized in a different product, and in many cases they accounted for half to seventy-five percent of the world’s output in the categories of things they manufactured. The coastal metroplexes were the ports, economic hubs, and increasingly international centers for the two river states. Why did they need Taiwan? Why were they even thinking about risking this magnificent economic machine that they had built?
The flex-fuel BMW 785 had been waiting curbside after he was whisked through Customs and Immigration by an expediter. China was now growing more whip grass than the United States and fueling more cars with flex-fuel or ethanol blends. Rubenstein had been the only passenger in first class on the Cathay Pacific 787ER that had flown him nonstop from Washington. The flight attendants had been amazed. First class was almost always full. So far, the Chinese were making it painless to go halfway around the world for a mysterious meeting. He had, however, not experienced the day that somehow disappeared as he crossed the international date line.
Arriving at the Grand Hyatt on the waterfront, Rubenstein was escorted through the lobby to the twelfth floor, where there appeared to be a special reception desk. The floor, he was informed, was a special Asian spa area. His room had blond wood paneling, a raised floor, its own steam room, and a deep tub with a picture window. From his balcony, he looked down on a frenzy of ferries and passenger ships zipping back and forth to Kowloon, Macau, and up the Pearl River. The high-rise towers all along the waterfront were engaged in some sort of synchronized light show. Inside on the desk was the traditional welcome letter from the manager, but next to it was a business card. It read: “Simon Manley, Purveyor of Fruits and Nuts, Durban, South Africa.” Sol almost laughed out loud. The card’s sender had used the same alias during the Islamyah crisis a few years before. Sol surpressed the laugh, assuming the room was bugged and not wanting to attract attention to his discovery. He flipped the card over and saw the handwritten scrawl: “Welcome. I will be in the spa garden at 9pm.”
The spa garden was a series of outdoor rooms, meditation pools, and decks. He found “Simon Manley”—Brian Douglas—in the spa’s bar and then followed him out to the lap pool. “This place still has a British flavor, Queens Road, Lower Albert Road, where the Foreign Correspondence Club still feels very colonial. I’m not so sure that we actually gave it up,” Brian mused as they looked out at the harbor traffic.
“In some ways, you Brits gave up Hong Kong, but China didn’t get it. It’s a Special Autonomous Region for fifty years,” Sol recalled. “Right?”
“With its own little army of twenty-five thousand police and a navy of over one hundred vessels,” Brian added. “The way they operate reminds me very much of England, of Scotland Yard.”
“The only part of Britain this reminds me of is the Docklands, with all its clusters of high-rises,” Sol replied, walking up next to Brian at the edge of the balcony. “Was your previous stop productive? Find a lot of nuts?”
Brian placed a small digital camera on the railing and pressed its power button. A green light appeared. It had not detected a laser or other technical audio collection, and it was now sending out ultrasonic sound waves to break up any remote collection. “I’m not sure whether the man I met was a sincere source or someone the Guoanbu was running at me. Basically, he said President Huang did not authorize any attacks in or on America, has some loyal Guoanbu types checking into it, and is having a hard time reining in the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army. Seems the PLA boys took the shoot-down by Taiwan personally and are looking to teach Taiwan a lesson if they push independence, even though it will cost the PLA and China a lot economically.”
“Hmmph,” Sol replied.
“I know, I know. It sounds like what the Chinese would want us to believe, but they did at least make a good show of chasing me and the source into the air-conditioning ducts,” Brian added, sniffing at his single-malt. “But maybe Huang does need help, and it’s certainly true that sailing the Seventh Fleet up close won’t help things right now.”
“My President needs help, too. We’ve sustained a lot more damage than the PLA’s air force,” Sol countered, turning his back on the harbor.
“They still haven’t gotten most of California’s power grid back online,” Brian observed. “And if it wasn’t China that did that attack and the internet beachheads, who did? I’m still betting on Beijing.”
Sol Rubenstein shook his head in agreement. “Apparently the Pentagon has cleared Botswana as a suspect.”
1530 EST
George Washington Bridge
New York City
“Don’t you think it’s dangerous, meeting him at a private airport? What if he plans to snatch you, kidnap you, take you to Russia, for God’s sake?” Jessica Foley was looking at her husband as much as the traffic as she drove him to the executive jetport a few miles away on the New Jersey side. “Can’t you call for backup or something?”
“Jess, you watch too many cop shows. I don’t want backup. It may be better that I’m the only one, I mean, we’re the only ones that know about this, whatever Belov has in mind.” Jimmy had thought about calling his old partner, Vinny DeCarlo. “Why would Belov kidnap me? He’s trying to help me.”
“The mafia don, or czar, or whatever you call a Russian godfather, is trying to help you? Give me a break!” Jessica looked away from the traffic for a second and at her husband. “Jimmy, you arrested his nephew in Boston, you’re sending him to Siberia.”
“Petersburg, probably, but not if Belov comes through for me. I shouldn’t have brought you along this morning. I think he might have made you for my wife. He calls on our landline.” Jimmy gently pulled out his Sig and chambered a round. He felt his left calf for the holster with the concealed carry Walther P99. Jessica just looked at him. “Stay in the car,” he said as he walked into the executive jet terminal.
He looked out at the apron. There were scores of private jets, from VLJs to the near supersonic-cruise Gulfstream VIIs, that could get to the coast in under three hours. “Gregori wants to see you in his plane,” a deep voice said behind him. Jimmy flashed his credentials to the security guards and walked around the screening post onto the tarmac and out to a Yak-188 halfway down the flight line. Belov stood by the foot of the stairs to the plane.
Jimmy looked at the odd Russian aircraft. “This is not a Boeing, Gregori,” he began. “When you’re flying, you always want the plane to be American.”
“Somebody owed me some money, so I got a plane instead. It’s a nice plane, flies to Petersburg nonstop.” Belov shooed his guard away. “Jimmy, before we go inside, I need another promise.”
“Your nephew and Fort Drum. What else?”
“You wanted information, Jimmy. You wanted it fast. I got some of it, fast. You can forget how I got it, yes?” Belov waited for an answer.
“Within limits. You guys didn’t shoot the Pope again, did you?”
Belov climbed into the Yak, and Jimmy followed. “Jimmy, this is Sergei Yellin, Dimitri’s son. He will tell you what he learned today.”
Sergei looked to be in his early thirties. He sat in one of the large flight seats that could recline into a bed. There were small stains on his shirt, darkened blood. His right hand was red and swollen. Jimmy was beginning to understand Belov’s concern about methods.
“As you know, Detective, the day that my father disappeared, his body guards did, too. I have been paying their families survivors’ benefits, with Gregori’s help.” He nodded respectfully to his new protector. “Usually on a meet with someone, Papa would take his car and the Escalade for the men. Then there would be a backup car trailing, something simple like a Chevy, sort of undercover. That day there was no backup car, because Papa told Igor Tumanek to run an errand over to Queens. That’s what Igor told me.” He exhaled. He was nervous, anxious, irate. “But when Gregori called me today after he met with you…I checked the E-ZPass bill for the Chevy. It went over the GW bridge thirty-two minutes after Papa’s Caddy.”
Belov picked up the story. “Igor was simply running late, like a half hour late. He was not involved, I’m convinced. If he had been doing his job, he would have been outside the alarm company up the street here where the meet took place. He would have heard or seen something. Dimitri would be alive today.”
Jimmy sat next to Belov on the couch and asked him, “So how does this help me?”
“Igor realized something was up when he got to the alarm company and there was nobody there, no cars. He’s a bright boy, lazy but bright, so he thinks ‘Why meet in Teterboro unless you’re using the Executive Jet airport?’ He drives over to the airport, to here, where we are now. Let him tell you what he did then. Come with me.”
Jimmy followed Belov through the cabin door into the rear compartment. A man sat bound and beaten, strapped in a flight seat, with a goon on either side of him. One of the men ripped off the duct tape over Igor’s mouth, and with it some flesh. Igor moaned and gasped for air. Jimmy noticed a large bloody bandage totally covering Igor’s right ear and wondered if there was anything left underneath it.
“Igor, tell this man in English about the planes,” Belov instructed.
He gasped again and nodded toward a bottle of water. They let him have a short drink and then poured the rest over his head. He was shaking, but he spoke. “When I got to the airport, I saw the man. Dimitri call him Spetsnaz, but he call himself Coming Ham. It was the man I had seen at the other meet, the time before. I was supposed to follow him after the first meet, get his license plate, but it didn’t work.”
Belov shook his head at the incompetence. “Never do business with someone you do not know. Greed! Igor, go on.”
“Mr. Spetsnaz was getting into a Gulfstream, but first he talk to his men at their Boeing. They were loading big bags onto the Boeing.” Belov struck him hard across the face. “What did you think were in those bags, Igor, you idiot?”
Surprisingly, Igor Tumanek continued with his story. “I write down the plane numbers and give some money to the girl inside the terminal, check out who owns them. I thought if I tell Sergei I was so late, he’d be mad, so I didn’t give him the names. Until today.”
Belov stood and walked back to the forward cabin. Jimmy went, too, leaving Igor Tumanek with his mob associates. “The names come back to shell companies in Vienna and McLean, Virginia,” Belov said, reseating himself next to Sergei Yellin. “You know what that means, Jimmy. You guys.”
For a moment, Jimmy wondered if he was going to be strapped into a chair, too. “It means somebody wants it to look like CIA. Please give me the names and I will personally find out.”
“And you will tell us,” Sergei added.
“I will.”
Belov stood. “Let’s get off the plane. Sergei is taking Mr. Tumanek to Petersburg tonight. Or maybe Igor won’t make it all the way.”
Back in the terminal, Belov wanted to cash in. “Good enough?”
“If that lead gets me where I want to…Wait a minute. Hold on,” Jimmy said, looking over Belov’s head. There was a surveillance camera on the wall. He turned and looked out the window at the ramp. There were cameras all the way down the flight line. He walked over to the TSA screeners and pulled aside the supervisor, flashed his credentials again. “The cameras, they’re digital? You keep back files?”
“Sure they’re digital. Intelligent surveillance software does the looking for us, then it’s all fed to D.C. in real time and stored at headquarters. I think they keep it ninety days. But you’ll need a warrant.”
Jimmy walked away, then hit his headset and then hit the touch-pad inside his jacket. “Sox, my man. TSA headquarters. How’s their firewalls and shit?”
“Piece a cake, James. Whaddaya need? How’s the eye thing working? They give you an upgrade?” Soxster was already typing in the IP address of TSA’s internal network.
When he was done talking to the Dugout, Jimmy walked back to Belov. Then he hit another speed dial. “Tommy, how are ya? How’s my aunt doin’? Listen, Tom, remember that Russkie from up in Lynn there? The one I wanted to send to Novosibirsk? Yeah, that’s the slimeball. Listen, Tommy, turns out he was an innocent bystander. No, really. So you’re the charging officer on it, right? No, don’t let him walk, we need him on a federal case. May hafta put him in the Wipp somewheres. I’ll work out the details with ya tomorra. Great, Tommy. Hey, and remember the Yanks are gonna clobber them Red Sox down in Florida Monday. Right, Tom. ’Night.”
“I assume that was Gaelic.” Belov looked up at the tall, young Irish-American. “Thank you.”
“Fort Drum may take a while,” Jimmy said, shaking hands, “but it’ll happen.”
Belov began to walk off and then turned. “And thank your partner, Susan Connor. She looks so much like your wife, Jessica.”
1830 EST
The Dugout
Watertown, Massachusetts
As usual, Soxster was the first to show up at the Dugout. Saturday night usually meant pizza, beer, and the liveliest activity in the private hacker chat rooms where passwords and credit-card numbers were traded for newly discovered flaws in websites and source code. He punched in his security code and then pushed the ten-foot-long warehouse door back on its wheels. The shards of glass by the door were the first things he noticed. Then he saw that the shelves, which had held every imaginable type of server, PC, and storage device, were empty. At their workstations, the monitors had been smashed.
Realizing that the men responsible might still be around, or have left a couple of thugs nearby, Soxster reached inside his parka to its zippered inside pocket and withdrew the P232 and its clip. It was a SIG-Sauer, but not the law-enforcement kind like Jimmy’s. It was a knockoff of the famous Walther PPK, a .380 designed to fit in a pocket or an ankle holster. Jimmy had reluctantly talked Tommy McDonough into giving Soxster a concealed carry permit, which was practically impossible to get out of the Mass. State Police. Soxster slipped in the clip and chambered a round. He wished he had spent more time at the Rod and Gun Club range in Acton.
Crouching down, Soxster moved into the Dugout, holding the gun with both hands. He moved behind Greenmonsta’s workstation. It had been trashed and, he noticed, the hard drive had been ripped out of the Mac G8. All the hard drives were probably gone. He hoped there were fingerprints as he sat quietly on the floor, listening for any sound in the cavernous space. Quietly, he slipped out his PDA and tapped out a text message to the Dugout group list: “Dugout raided. Stay away.”
Then he thought about calling Jimmy and remembered the urgency of the task Foley had given him. He carefully stepped back out of the Dugout into the corridor and hit the speed dial for Jimmy Foley. “The Russians, the Chinese, whoever, they’ve been here. Trashed everything, ripped off the hard drives. What do I do?”
The Foleys had just arrived back at their little Battery Park City apartment overlooking the Hudson. “Okay. Don’t panic.” Jimmy could hear the tension in Soxster’s voice. “Clear the zone, but with your eyes open. Be careful of places somebody could be hiding. Then get in the car and drive over toward Boston University, 1010 Comm. Ave. It’s Tommy McDonough’s office. Don’t take your weapon in with you. Stay there. Maybe he’ll let you use his computer, but at any rate you’ll be safe there. Tommy will send a forensics team over to the Dugout.” Jimmy paused a moment and added, “There’s nothing in there that shouldn’t be in there, right, like—”
“Drugs? Hell no,” Soxster said into his earpiece. “Shit! I bet those bastards took my Kistler chard.” Soxster took the fire escape out of the building, hopped a fence, and hailed a cab to near BU. McDonough arrived while Soxster was still trying to explain things to the uniformed trooper in the State Police lobby.
“Jimmy said this was damn important,” Tommy McDonough explained. “Better be, cuz I was comped Celtics tickets. Had ta give ’em to the neighbor kid.” He showed Soxster into a room filled with computers.
“Wow, antediluvian,” Soxster let slip.
“This is just stuff we’ve seized. Keep it for parts. Good stuff ’s back there. You set up in there, while I get the forensics boys in from their Saturday-night beans and franks with the family.” On his way out of the door, McDonough turned back to Soxster, “They ain’t gonna find no drugs in there, right?”
Soxster felt a little odd using one government agency’s computer crime lab to hack another government agency’s network, but moving fast was important and it would be late Monday by the time TSA agreed to give them what they needed. He was glad that he kept some key tools on his 100-gigabyte PDA. He was quickly on to an anonymity-providing server in Canada, then out to a university system in Texas, then the public library in New York City, on to a system located somewhere at an internet exchange point. He began capturing all of the digital conversations to find any traffic having an IP address that fell within the network ranges assigned to TSA. There were plenty to choose from.
The communication stream he chose was a file sharing app that tunneled over port 80, designed to let users access the internet with a web browser and not be blocked by the firewall. It was running as a TSA employee downloaded a pirated copy of a movie still playing in theaters. Taking that path in, Soxster scanned the network. There were no internal firewalls or file-encryption system. They also had not instituted identity-based access-control lists. He looked for big network storage devices where video logs would reside. Bingo!
It was huge, terabytes of files. He searched on “Teterboro” and “03.10.12.” There were four cameras. He began with the file “Internal/terminal/magnetometer” and sent it sailing to the music file-sharing application on his new State Police desktop. As he started to load “flight line—north,” the connection was broken and an image of a red stop sign popped up with the words. “You are engaged in an unauthorized transmission of government files out of the TSA network. This may be a criminal act punishable by a million-dollar fine or twenty years in jail, or both. TSA/CISO.”
“Shit!” Soxster said in the empty room, and broke the connection. They must have had some egress-control system looking for large file transfers. Well, at least he got one big file out. Jimmy had said to begin looking at people arriving about three in the afternoon and freeze-frame the faces of all the adults. That would take a while, even using the intelligent video and facial recognition software he had acquired. And then there was the little problem that they had no database of faces with which to compare the images, no facial-recognition equivalent of mug sheets. Or at least, not yet. But he was inside a State Police computer room.
While the first desktop machine sorted through the file from Teterboro, Soxster moved to another workstation and logged in as “McDonough, T.” He hit the “forgot password” link and the system was soon asking him to supply “favorite sports team.” McDonough had said he had Celtics tickets, but his favorite team could have been the Patriots, Sox, or Bruins. Then Soxster thought: I bet McDonough went to Boston College. The Eagles. Soxster went with it and was quickly inside the State Police network. Not only did they have mug shots, they had access to FBI mug shots. Soxster got to work.
A few hours later, as the clogged local area network that he had strung together was churning away comparing faces at Teterboro Airport with known criminals, he checked in with Jimmy Foley in New York. “You know, James, already I can tell you an awful lot of these guys at the Executive Jet terminal have had serious trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
“Not surprising. But no one who was mobbed up, no Russkies?” Jimmy asked.
“Nope, not using this database.”
“Any Asians, Chinese-looking?” Jimmy asked.
“Sure, but I don’t know who they are,” Soxster said, starring at the faces zooming by on the screen.
“Can you believe there were one hundred and eight takeoffs out of that airport after three o’clock that afternoon? I got the printout from the FAA. That place makes LaGuardia look sleepy,” Jimmy mused while poring through a spreadsheet. “No one went anywhere suspicious, unless you count West Palm, and they were all aircraft owned by big corporations or chartered by them: Mousenet, Google, Nanotech, Pharmagen.” He scrolled down the list. “Then alphabet soup. GE, GD, SAIC, BAH, DCS, EMC, CNN…”
“We need Susan,” Soxter admitted. “How’s she doing down in the Bahamas by herself? Kind of scary, her soloing. I don’t trust Gaudium, and I think she’s fallen for his whole line of crap about how we shouldn’t ‘change what it means to be human.’”
“I talked to her this afternoon,” Jimmy replied while cross-referencing company names. “I think she’s getting suspicious of Gaudium, too. She wanted you to check out the private security firm he owns, Dominion Commonwealth Services—sounds pretty vague.”
“That would be DCS? Didn’t you just—” Soxster hoped he had heard correctly.
“Shit, yeah,” Jimmy said, pulling up the flight list. “Gulfstream VII registered to DCS, Dover, Delware. Took off at 1705 headed for Santa Rosa. Where’s that?”
“California. It’s about twenty minutes south of Napa, and, guess what, it’s even closer to Russian River,” Soxster said, snapping his fingers.
“Could still be innocent. Gaudium owns a security firm, which undoubtedly does some business in Manhattan. Execs from the firm fly out to see the owner. Nonetheless…,” Jimmy said as he was hunting for the Dominion Commonwealth Services website. There wasn’t one.
“Who doesn’t have a website?” Soxster asked.
“It’s incorporated in Delaware,” Jimmy noted.
“They all are. I think Delaware gives out coupons for free upgrades at Marriott when you register three or more companies,” Soxster joked as he surfed to the Delaware Secretary of Corporations site. “Okay, here it is. Their offices is a P.O. box in Sperryville, Virginia. Gaudium is not listed as an officer. There is an Elizabeth Eloh, who is the CEO, and an R. Nayk is the secretary and treasurer of the corporation. They are not publicly traded.”
“Let’s Google them,” Jimmy said, looking for any reference to the company, anywhere in cyberspace. “Oh, here’s something. They must be pretty legitimate. They ran a recruiting ad in Army Times and in Christian Soldiers. And here’s a story about the guy who used to run SOCOM, Special Forces Command—General Bowdin, retiring to go be the COO at Dominion Commonwealth.”
“Bowdin? Francis X. Bowdin?” Soxster asked. “Isn’t he the guy that got forced out for giving fundamentalist evangelical speeches to the troops? Yeah, and he was mentioned in Professor Myers’s article. He was a leading crusader against Transhumanism. Saw it leading to the ‘End of Days.’”
“What the fuck is Transhumanism?” Jimmy asked.
“It’s a movement that supports improving humanity through genetic engineering, enhancements of all kinds, including human-machine interface, brain downloads, nano implacements, things like your eye…,” Soxster sputtered.
“How do you know about my eye? Never mind, keep that fact to yourself,” Jimmy muttered as he pulled up a Google image of Francis X. Bowdin in his Special Forces green beret. “Try an image of Bowdin on the facial-recognition software.”
“Already did.” Soxster sat looking at an image of Bowdin in civilian clothes, walking through the Teterboro security check at 1621 on March 10. “It still may not prove anything.”
“Wait a minute. Jesus Christ!” Jimmy screamed into his headset. “It does prove something. The guy who hired the Russians who blew up the beachheads, the guy who probably them killed them. Dimitri Yellin called him Mr. Spetsnaz because he reminded him of a Russian soldier. Spetsnaz…”
“…means Special Forces!” Soxster finished the sentence. “Once you look like an SF general, you always look like an SF general. It’s been him that China has been using to fuck us over, bomb shit.”
“I’ll bet my wife’s paycheck that it’s been him.” There was elation in Jimmy’s voice. “But probably not working for China, but for Gaudium. Look at it. Bowdin’s a religious fanatic all worked up about this Transhumanism, just like Senator Bloviator. He teams up with a rich, mad scientist who shares the same fears. Motive, means, opportunity.”
“Wait, Jimmy. Susan is down on some atoll alone with Bowdin’s guys, who are probably about to blow up some baby clinic.”
“And she’s probably about to be blown up in some baby clinic. I got to get a message to her without letting them know that we’re onto them.” Jimmy zoomed his right eye in on Ellis Island as his mind raced. “And I have to prove all of this to Rusty before the Pentagon bops China. It’s been us, Americans, all along. Shit!”