9:22 A.M.
THE CARLYLE
MADISON AVENUE
MANHATTAN
Igor stared at a large curvilinear computer screen.
His apartment at the Carlyle was luxurious and had the feeling, usually, of a peaceful aerie high above the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His apartment was austere, with very little furniture. The windows were specialized, wrapped in a thin velum of microcopper membrane. The walls, ceilings, and floors contained custom manufactured insulation and even the electric current in the apartment went through a cipher. All of it was there to prevent electronic eavesdropping.
Igor could hear the roar of multiple sirens from the streets.
The table was long, rectangular, and glass. He had a perfect view of Madison Avenue. In the distance, the sky was hazy and crossed with smoke clouds, like a volcano that’s just erupted. It was detritus from the tunnels miles away to the south, spewing heat and ash into the sky. But Igor wasn’t looking at the view at this particular moment. Instead, he was focused on the curvilinear computer screen.
The concave LCD was lit up in a maze of photos, live videos, digits, and letters. There were at least twenty separate applications running on Igor’s computer. All of it was somehow correlated to the attack on New York City.
Igor was tapped into Langley, Quantico, and NYPD’s operating platform through the main trunk, enabling him to see what activity was taking place on the ground and behind the scenes, in real time.
Part of the screen was taken up by a gallery of several dozen individual live video feeds, spread across the screen like a checkerboard, each feed inputted by some sort of surveillance camera, including several attached to the gear of NYPD officers, police cruisers, CCTV surveillance cameras. Igor did not control any of these feeds; he was, in essence, eavesdropping on the real-time efforts of law enforcement.
The individual feeds lurched between different scenes of panicked New Yorkers running through the streets, and gunfights. Several feeds displayed the four tunnels and the shorelines closest to the tunnels, where whole buildings had collapsed and fires were spreading out.
Another section showed feeds from the air—drones, helicopters, and satellites—each a different vantage point of the chaos. Smoke and fire from above. A macro view of Manhattan in disarray and chaos.
Other than when Igor typed, the only noise was the diffuse sound of sirens and gunfire from the streets.
A section of the wide curvilinear screen was taken up by scrolling lines of green letters and numbers moving rapidly down. Igor had opened up a host of diagnostic applications he was now using to attempt to understand what was going on, and what was going to happen next, based on various metadata and electronic signals intelligence, or SIGINT. He was provisioned inside the NSA’s ThinThread network, poring through the original signals data from the Berlin initiation point several hours before. Taking the ThinThread discovery, Igor had isolated a string of individuated metadata—basically a marker code—and run it against a proprietary algorithm he himself had written. He had determined that the long string of random letters and numbers were from a SIM card issued by MTN Irancell, the state-owned cellular provider in Iran. He couldn’t determine who made the call, only that the card used was a one-month tourist SIM card, purchased at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport three days ago. By rank-stacking the SIM card’s issue number, sandwiching it between the card bought before and the one bought after, Igor had been able to pinpoint the card’s time of purchase within eight minutes of when it was bought. From there, it was a matter of simply pushing all purchase data from the airport MTN Irancell store against all flights that left Tehran after that, focusing, obviously, on that day and moving outward.
That’s what one of his screens was now doing, trying to find correlations.
But as Igor waited for the results of his analysis as to the origination of the call, a different part of the wide computer screen abruptly froze. This was a screen he hadn’t even really been using, other than as a catalog of sorts for the various programs he had running on other screens.
The screen flashed a neon red icon in the upper right corner. Across the frozen section of screen, the word NOCOS appeared in white caps.
“Enter on four one,” said Igor with his thick Russian accent, speaking to the computer as he watched the icon—after recognizing his voice—burst into a live video feed.
He was looking straight ahead, through a camera on an individual, a chest-mounted wireless camera. It was body camera footage from someone in law enforcement. It was a recording only hours old. The officer was lifting the limp head of a dead man, a body slumped over in a car, a riot of blood, a hole in the neck, and, on his face, a missing eyeball, a horrible-looking empty hole, surrounded by blood and recently mauled tissue.
Igor spoke:
“Program.”
“Everest,” came a robotic, synthetic female voice.
Everest was a facial recognition platform.
From the dead man’s right eye—the remaining eye still in the socket—a digital balloon interrupted the screen.
A bright white digital box. The file photo of a man.
TOP SECRET
-NOSEC—NOSEC—NOSEC—NOSEC—NOSEC—NOSEC—NOSEC-
ALPINA 42.6
IDENTITY:
LAWRENCE, PHILLIP
GOVERNOR adjutant 14
U.S FEDERAL RESERVE
Igor spoke:
“Why am I looking at this?”
The computer:
“Einstein 3, high-value incident,” said the voice.
Einstein 3 was an NSA algorithm that filtered secure government gateways for metadata, including the most mundane internet traffic, always focused in on government officials, even at a local level. Igor had customized it so that it was always on but only made its presence known when it found something.
The screen showed the dead man, Lawrence, in a photo from a few years before. He was one of four individuals: three men and one woman.
The screen popped up a document.
________THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL RESERVE
CHARTER AMENDMENT TO UNITED STATES TREASURY c.67T
ACTION 290-B
FEDWIRE
TC CODE: 1000000000–1
DECEMBER 5, 1998
_____4
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
-Action 290-B establishes a central and secure digital framework for the management of all transactions by and between the U.S. Federal Reserve and any governmental or non-governmental entities.
-Action 290-B establishes a U.S. Treasury enterprise composed of four (4) individuals whose responsibility—as a necessarily combined redundant entity—is to effectively manage all debits and credits of the Federal Reserve whose transactional value are more than one billion dollars.
-THE FEDERAL RESERVE WILL CHARGE SUCH INDIVIDUALS, HEREINAFTER REFERRED TO AS GOVERNORS, TO MANAGE ALL MOVEMENT OF FEDERAL RESERVE ASSETS AND SHALL BE INDEMNIFIED HEREBY FROM SUCH ACTIONS, PER ACTION 290-B
Igor realized that the man who’d been murdered was one of the individuals who managed the Federal Reserve.
As Igor read on, his mouth went agape, and he felt his heart palpitating. The dead man, Lawrence, had been flagged on a remote NSA algorithm. Lawrence and three other individuals were in charge of something even he barely understood, Fedwire. They controlled, day in and day out, approximately $5 trillion of sovereign American wealth—the entire liquidity of the United States Federal Reserve and thus the United States of America.
The ebb and flow of money.
Igor believed he knew everything, and yet, in a fraction of a moment, he realized he didn’t know anything.
He typed furiously, attacking levels of information deep inside government servers, using the NSA root to find another level of information. It was a Level 3 file, so secret that it was locked inside a cryptographic fortress, layered with various encryption keys, but Igor quickly bored into the kernel of highly secure data in which the identities of the four governors was displayed with photos and links to their backgrounds:
FENNER, DAVID [670–3 T.9]
JAKLITSCH, ADAM [411–1 Q.4]
LAWRENCE, PHILLIP [700–3 V.0]
WINIKOFF, KARA [329–0 Z.1]
When the screen froze again, a cold chill washed over him. Another algorithm appeared on the screen. A small red circle started flashing.
The algorithm was cued off the profile Igor was now pushing against every available database he could find. It was metadata, a cell call to 911, only just live. In this case a woman, her eyeball missing. She was already known to Igor, for she was on the LCD next to Lawrence.
Kara Winikoff.
He ran all four names against the data cipher that had flagged Winikoff. The results came back almost immediately. All four were dead.
____________FENNER, DAVID [670–3 T.9]
—deceased—
Per NYPD Brooklyn 17 06:15 AM EST
____________JAKLITSCH, ADAM [411–1 Q.4]
—deceased—
Per NYPD Manhattan 71 06:45 AM EST
____________LAWRENCE, PHILLIP [700–3 V.0]
—deceased—
Per PD Mt Kisco NY 06:57 AM EST
____________WINIKOFF, KARA [329–0 Z.1]
—deceased—
Per NYPD Manhattan 44 07:20 AM EST
Igor scanned the reports. Three of them were shot in the chest, Lawrence got it in the neck, all at close range, all inside vehicles.
Each of them had had one of their eyeballs cut out. Each of them was missing a thumb, freshly hacked off. It was a tightly choreographed operation.
Igor cut out of the live feed as Everest scrolled.
___________ All four governors will work at the same time and will coordinate schedules accordingly without exception.
___________ All four must be present for any movement of liquidity.
___________ Place of work should be secure and anonymous.
___________ Latest technology should always be employed to not only move assets but to gain entrance.
___________ Governors shall be selected on the basis of intellectual capability.
___________ A council will be formed of private sector leaders whose role will be the selection of said governors.
___________ The council and governors will remain anonymous and their activities secret under threat of sedition.
Igor picked up his cell and dialed.
“I’m busy,” said Polk.
“It’s important.”
“New York is under siege,” said Polk. “The president is trapped. Unless it’s more important than that, I don’t have the time.”
“It’s more important,” said Igor.
“I’m listening,” said Polk.
“Everything is a distraction,” said Igor. “It is far more serious and complicated, Bill.”
“How?”
Igor spoke Russian:
“Delo v den’gakh. Eto vsegda o den’gakh.”
It’s about the money. It’s always about the money.
“Skazhi chto ty imeyesh’ v vidu,” said Polk.
Say what you mean.
“They’re hacking into the Federal Reserve,” said Igor. “The president is a subterfuge. The room where it’s all managed must be in Manhattan.”
“There’s no way,” said Polk.
“What do you know about the governors of the Fed?” said Igor in a sharp voice, communicating the urgency of the question. “Fedwire?”
There was a pause.
“I’m not allowed to discuss that,” said Polk.
“All four were killed this morning,” said Igor, interrupting. “Four governors, four different locations. They each got shot and each one of them is missing a thumb and an eyeball.”
Polk was silent for several seconds.
“This is turning into a really shitty day,” said Polk.
“The eyes and prints allow them into the room,” Igor said. “It’s an iris-based provisioning structure backed up by prints. All four individuals need to be there simultaneously in order to enter. Or at least their thumbs and eyes.”
“Entry protocols,” said Polk. “I’m hooking us into someone who knows about the Fed, especially the systems you’re talking about. In the meantime, try and get a handle on the entry architecture. CENCOM, establish Igor, Singerman, and me over JWICS.”
“Yes, sir.”