6:42 A.M.
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE (SID)
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Samantha Stout, the top analyst in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, saw a flashing red icon on one of the two large computer screens in front of her. Stout hit a few keys and the screen shot to a live feed of a satellite grid looking down on Manhattan. The relief was black. The screen was black with a digitally imposed red border around the island of Manhattan. Above the city, from the view of the satellite grid, was a growing crosshatch of red lines, like a spider’s web.
Across the top of the screen was bright yellow block print:
ALERT: LEVEL 2 TERTIARY
“Update,” said Stout as she adjusted in her seat, speaking to her computer.
“Affirmative,” came an automated female voice, in simplified terms the NSA’s version of Alexa.
“Time of event,” she said.
“One thirty-two A.M. eastern standard time.”
“Duration.”
“Ninety-seven seconds,” came the robotic female voice.
“Post-action frame and follow,” said Stout to the computer as she typed into the keyboard and brought the second screen into the dataset.
The first screen showed a black background with the world imposed on it in a map of yellow digital lines. The screen homed in on the U.S. and Europe, illuminated in thin lines like an air traffic controller’s screen. Then, the map relayed the metadata from an event that had just occurred. The screen scrolled the event in real time, as if in fast-forward motion. Suddenly, there appeared a rapid cross section of red lines between Europe and the U.S., until the agglomeration of red was a blur. At exactly one minute thirty seconds, the miasma of crisscrossing red lines indicating signals activity disappeared.
Stout refocused the grid and followed one of the lines. It was the only line that went away from New York.
“Up two, over three, then tighten in,” she said.
The view became of a larger area.
“Control east target,” she ordered the computer.
She saw where the cluster of activity had arisen from.
“Berlin?” she said aloud, to no one. “Why Berlin?”
Stout typed and was soon inside the signals metadata. She cut down into layers of encrypted data like a butcher sawing through a cow.
A green splash of numbers, frozen in motion:
8579980002
It had been a phone call. That was all she could tell. From an old burner, a cell phone—not a SIM card. It was a number NSA had locked into more than two years before.
The alert—the flashing icon—was an automated response from an algorithm Stout had herself built. The number was active again.
ALERT: LEVEL 2 TERTIARY
One phone call followed by ninety-seven seconds of mad activity, then silence.
Stout saw a second occurrence before the signal trail went dead—a call, text, or email from the same device. She typed quickly, decrypting the second signal. It was a phone call to another burner. The duration of the call: fourteen seconds. She ran the signal against a GPS. The location appeared on a map, which she zoomed in on, a cold chill arising in her spine: the map settled down on a building in Yonkers, New York.
“Holy shit.”
Stout stood and swept her blond hair over her shoulders. She walked fast down the hall and entered the office of her boss, Jim Bruckheimer, the head of SID, without knocking.
Bruckheimer was standing behind his desk. He was on the phone. Stout gave him an icy glare.
“Call you back,” said Bruckheimer, hanging up. “What’s up?” he said to Stout.
“I’m seeing an attack pattern,” said Stout. “ThinThread. It came from a Level Two Tertiary, a phone call from Berlin. A call to a phone north of New York City then a classic attack cloud. In the hundreds, then it stopped. Minute and a half in duration.”
Bruckheimer knew what it meant: Level 1 meant a terrorist. Level 2 was a signal, such as a phone call or e-mail, from a close associate to a Level 1. It meant a signal had been tracked to someone— or more specifically, something—SID was watching, such as a SIM card, a credit card, a laptop, a phone. It could be meaningless. A Level 2 could potentially be a noninvolved private citizen, such as a gardener who some Level 1 had called to get his lawn mowed. But America could not afford to be wrong. Most of all, Stout was worried about the cluster of SIGINT immediately following the first phone call.
“Who?” said Bruckheimer.
“We don’t know the owner,” said Stout. “All we know is this cell at one point in time was used in communication with a Level One.”
“Does it scan?” he said.
“Right now I’m running against usual suspects,” said Samantha. “Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, HASM. Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, Haqqani Network, ISIS, along with all their various splinters.”
“So tell me again, what’s the attack pattern?” said Bruckheimer, picking up his phone and hitting speed dial.
“The first phone call initiated at least three hundred other calls in and around Manhattan, followed by thousands more. It was a mushroom cloud, then it disappeared.”
Bruckheimer looked at his watch. It was 6:55 A.M. He put the phone to his ear.
“Who are you calling?” said Stout.
“The president is going to New York City this morning,” said Bruckheimer. “He’s speaking at the UN.”
Stout looked at Bruckheimer. “I haven’t run any of this down, Jim.”
“Better safe than sorry,” said Bruckheimer.
Bruckheimer heard a voice on the console, even as he stared into Samantha’s eyes, both sharing a moment of silent recognition of the fact that the U.S. was potentially under attack—and they were behind.
“Yeah, Jim?” came a male voice. It was the deep, smooth baritone of Hector Calibrisi. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We have something going on,” said Bruckheimer. “This is real time. We’re seeing an attack pattern in and around New York City. Signals-level data that started in Germany with a phone call, followed by hundreds of calls in and around New York City. We back-pulled the metadata. I know Dellenbaugh is going there this morning. It looks like a classic mushroom cloud.”
“Got it,” said Calibrisi. “I’m going to send a car over. We’re going to the White House. I want to brief Adrian King,” he added, referring to the White House chief of staff. “Tell your people to start running hard at this.”