9:28 A.M.
EAST FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Rokan exited the Westin through a revolving door that fed into a crowded, chaotic, even violent sidewalk on Forty-second Street.
Smoke filled the sky and people were running and they didn’t give a shit about who they ran over.
Traffic was still moving, though it was every man for himself, and he saw a minivan hurdle the sidewalk as it attempted to move west on Forty-second.
There were police sirens wailing in every direction.
But there were no active shooters. His path to the Fed would hopefully be clear. For even though he was on their side, any embedded Iranian shooter would have no way of knowing Rokan from anyone else. As such, Mansour had forbidden any actions on Forty-second Street.
He fell in with a stream of people moving toward the west, away from the UN. They all seemed to realize that the area to the east—behind them, where the UN was located—was radioactive. Smoke and dust were everywhere.
Rokan had never been deployed into a live operating situation. He was a technologist, a computer wizard of the highest caliber. But if he expected to feel fear, Rokan found himself in a state of giddiness, even delirium. Rokan’s father had been one of Iran’s highest-ranking nuclear scientists until the morning he and Rokan’s mother were blown up by a limpet bomb attached to his father’s car by Americans. As Rokan jogged west on the sidewalk, he pushed people aside, ignoring screams, and remembered his father and mother. He was receiving his second Ph.D. at the time, at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. He dropped out the day his parents were murdered and went back to Tehran, applying for transfer and being accepted to the Iranian military’s war college, the Supreme National Defense University, where he graduated number one in the advanced cyber training platform, a multidisciplinary doctorate considered the hardest and most prestigious degree at the university.
Rokan’s life was altered the day his parents died, altered with but one purpose: to avenge their deaths. But until this moment, as he jogged down the sidewalk amid pandemonium, he’d always understood his hatred for the U.S. in a way that was intellectual. Now, for the first time, he could feel it. It was the danger of the mission, certainly, but more so it was a feeling of exhilaration as he risked his life to avenge the death of his parents.
At Sixth Avenue, Rokan went right, moving along the west side of the street. Sixth Avenue was gridlocked. Screams echoed down the avenue and there was intermittent gunfire just a few blocks ahead.
Rokan charged between cars stopped in traffic, running north.
He came to a skyscraper, an older building of dark blue glass and limestone that arose in an austere rectangle, forty-five stories into the sky.
1135 Sixth Avenue.
Rokan paused as he reached the entrance. The sidewalk was crowded, as was the entrance. He stepped toward the street, where a line of black sedans was queued up. There were armed security men inside the lobby, guarding the entrance. Rokan walked to the door and waved at one of the guards.
The guard held a submachine gun, which he kept trained on Rokan. Behind the guard, the lobby was mostly empty, though a few people ran for the elevators.
“I work here,” said Rokan. “They’re killing people! Please, I just want to go to my office.”
“Of course, sir,” said the guard, lowering his weapon. “I just need to see some ID.”
“Yes, please hold on,” said Rokan. “Thank you.”
Rokan reached into his backpack as if retrieving his wallet. He removed an Uzi Pro 9x19 and started pumping the trigger as he whipped it around at the security guard. A dull, staccato drum of metallic thwap thwap thwap thwap echoed in the stone atrium as bullets splattered in a diagonal line up the guard’s chest. Rokan kept firing as he stepped inside the lobby, shooting down half a dozen people, as bullets from a handgun shattered glass just behind him. Rokan registered the source—a second guard behind the security desk—and whaled on him with the Uzi, spraying slugs in a furious collage in and around the man, hitting him in the head.
He went behind the security desk and pressed a series of buttons beneath it and there was a hydraulic noise as a steel wall descended inside the glass lobby, along the outer-facing glass, shutting off access in or out of the building.
Rokan had never liked the violence or killing. Though he was trained thoroughly in all manner of firearms and explosives, self-defense, and cold weapons, including years spent learning face-to-face combat, though he knew how to do it all, and do it well, this was not a source of pride. Rather, he found numbers, and their correlation to the real world via computers, to be the world in which he excelled. As he looked down at one of the dead security men, his chest and face already layered in congealing blood, he paused. What he did with numbers was far more cruel than what he had just done to the security officer. Yet the sight of the dead man made him sick to his stomach.
“I’m sorry,” said Rokan, kneeling and touching the man’s hand.
On his way to the elevators, he saw a woman he’d already shot, trying to crawl through her own blood. He lifted the firearm, pumped the trigger, and sent a few bullets into her head.
He reached the dead security guard and removed an access card from his pocket.
There was no doubt the Federal Reserve did not allow security personnel onto its floor. Rokan knew the card wouldn’t get him provisioned to twenty-five. Not yet, anyway. He held the barcode up to his phone and scanned it. The program scanned the barcode and then went into the underlying layer of XML, rewriting it so as to allow entrance to the floor Rokan wanted to go to. After a few moments, the screen lit up with a self-generated barcode provisioning Rokan. He stepped into the elevator and placed the phone in front of a scanner. The doors closed and the elevator cab ascended. When it stopped, he stepped off. The number “25” was on the brass jamb of the elevator, though the floor itself was sterile and strangely lit with bright chemical lights in white along with diffuse orange and light blue.
Rokan moved to his left, down a corridor without doors, walking in the direction of the light. A low humming noise grew louder as he walked toward the source of the light. When, finally, he came around the corner, he took in a sight he’d only just imagined. It was the entrance to the governors’ room. The room was across a thin hallway and in between was a mesmerizing wall of digital orange, white, and light blue.
It was the American government’s last line of defense—an iodine sheet field, a wall of energy with unbelievable heat and power. Rokan had studied the general concept of sheet fields and understood the basic idea: a controlled plane of energy created by computing power connected to it. The Americans had built a way of managing its money and, with the iodine sheet field, used the electrical heat of the metadata to create an impenetrable fortress.
There was no way in but with the irises and thumbprints of the four governors, and all four of them at once.
Directly before the thin corridor to the governors’ room there were four waist-high lecterns, atop of which were digital screens, where the governors were provisioned in by eye and thumb scanners. Beyond was a corridor that led to the governors’ room. The passageway was bright and glowing. An incessant, audible buzz permeated the air, like a bug trap.
Rokan walked slowly toward the four screens. He took a pen from his pocket and threw it at the sheet field. As it crossed the threshold into the delta of light, the pen disappeared in a millisecond of orange and a faint sizzle.
Rokan took off his jacket and hurled it at the passageway and watched as it disappeared in a crooked wisp of blue. There was not even a hint of smoke, and only the faintest noise.
Rokan put his backpack on the floor. He knelt down and removed the four small ziplock bags and held them up in front of him. He felt sick from the sight of the eyeballs and fingers, most of all from the blood. He stood up and went to the scanners.