10:06 A.M.
THE CARLYLE
MADISON AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Igor tried to reach Singerman at least a dozen times, but he didn’t answer.
He stared at a rectangle on the screen, thinking … hoping. What it showed was the Risch algorithm. There was no way to access it. So, instead, Igor stared at the rising columns of random numbers. It was the last few yards of protection via code, written by Singerman and America’s best computer scientists. He hoped that whatever secrets it was built on would hold. It was the proverbial last line of defense from anarchy.
Igor suddenly understood something that perhaps only he and the Iranian now inside the Fed understood. That he, Igor, was now powerless, and that he’d lost. The Fed itself—the internal room where the governors controlled all of America’s wealth—was now under enemy control, and it was only a matter of time until they wiped out the entire financial underpinnings of not only America, but the civilized world.
Hezbollah had sent a hacker of the highest order—and whoever it was was now sitting inside the governors’ room, provisioned inside, typing away, introducing attack algorithms designed to exploit vulnerabilities. That was the SIGINT he could see on a separate screen. It was only a matter of time before he found the entrance to the core code base.
Trying to hack into the Fed was futile. To access the true capital of the Federal Reserve—the daily volumetric inflows and outflows—one needed to be inside the room. It was a closed-loop system up and until it intersected with the grid somewhere on an outgoing path. It was a bubble. One needed to be inside the room. That realization was the genius of the Fed system—but now it represented its downfall.
Igor shut his eyes. He shook his head. Igor understood at some moment that there would be no way he could stop him, that the Iranian hacker was inside the central core of the American financial system.
He tapped his ear. He tried Singerman one more time.