10:04 A.M.
THE CARLYLE
MADISON AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Igor sat upright, in front of a wide arc of computer screens. They spread in a curvilinear concave on top of a glass desk held up by brass stanchions.
Igor was sliding and pivoting on an Eames office chair on wheels—high-back, stainless steel, and clad in bright lime green leather—skating along the mahogany floor in front of the array of computer screens. The screens were filled with various activity. Igor was shirtless. A can of Dr Pepper was next to an elongated, unusual-looking red keyboard with white letters and numbers. Behind the Dr Pepper can were half a dozen others, all empty.
Through the windows, the faint roar of sirens and occasional screams could be heard from the streets below.
Igor, for a computer hacker, was in good shape. He wasn’t brawny, but rather sculpted, thin, and tan. He had earbuds in both ears. Usually he would’ve been listening to music. But right now he was tied into a central communications tree at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Igor’s fingers moved intuitively across the keyboard, while his eyes swiveling back and forth between the two large screens, which were each cut into quadrants. Igor kept his eyes on eight different sections, watching everything as his fingers played the keyboard like a concert pianist.
The information on the screens was mostly streams of code, either white, green, yellow, or red against black, or black on white. This was the Fed. One section displayed a complex blueprint that he manipulated with the keyboard. It was a layout of a project in a Parametric Technologies digital CAD drawing. It was the architectural blueprints of the building that housed Fedwire, that part of the Fed that controlled all U.S. liquidity.
The second section of the screen was an algorithm written to determine the Federal Reserve’s security access to the room that housed the Risch algorithm that controlled the Federal Reserve, and thus the wealth and liquidity of the United States of America. He searched for vulnerabilities. Singerman had told him there was a security weakness in the entrance hardware. The entrance itself was some sort of electronic “sliding door” at the end of a fifty-foot corridor. To enter the governors’ room, one had to walk through the tunnel, which meant one had to turn off the electronic sliding door.
At the beginning of the tunnel were four screens. These were the screens the four governors of the Fed looked into, and pressed their thumbs down upon, in order to get into the tunnel. Igor obviously understood. This was why the governors had all been murdered.
One of the screens flashed green. It was providing him with signals metadata from the entrance corridor:
PEC: SCAN A-3
Ft. 50.0 Ht. 14.4 Temp. 4098.7 F
“Iisus,” said Igor aloud. “Chetyre tysyachi gradusov. Eto goryacho.”
Jesus. Four thousand degrees. That’s hot.
Igor ran the readings against a database he kept in a folder on his main platform, a folder composed of advanced weapons systems, beyond guns and ammunition, beyond chemical agents. All those were in a different folder. This one contained experimental weapons programs in the U.S., at the Pentagon and CIA, as well as what he’d been able to hack out of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Israel, and other countries, along with the private sector, companies like General Dynamics, Boeing, Airbus, Halliburton, Raytheon, and several others. The cutting edge of defense systems. It was a compendium of advanced, technology-based systems, still secret, still in their infancy.
He doubted the readings would find a match. Yet, after half a minute, a quadrant in the lower portion of one of the screens flashed bright red:
Dassault Systems
Lyon, FR
ETY: FOR/Svi
Testing: UNIT 4672–87
Summary: Iodine sheet field
Certainty: 96.4%
Igor continued reading about the defense system that was guarding the Fed.
Dassault’s Iodine Sheet Field (“ISF”) is a SIGINT binary, iodine-based heat defense system capable of being confined within a geometric walled parallel. ISF has been shown to turn on and off with thermal and/or chemical residue at 00.0013548 tHs per programmed grid pattern. It is the closest any government or company has gotten to a so-called force field, capable of being turned on and off, and heat and/or chemical protocols are untraceable immediately. The Dassault System ISF effectively vaporizes anything in its field of range, including human beings but more importantly any weapons and weapons systems, including bullets in flight and MANPADs. ISF is as of yet unknown to China or Russia. It was implemented by the U.S. Treasury Department at a cost of $16.4 billion. The location of the implementation is unknown, but it is most likely an end-of-days protective mechanism guarding the central trunk of the U.S. Treasury and the U.S.
Back on the first screen, Igor watched as new electronic signals emanated for the first time in hours from the Federal Reserve. But it was not benign. This was primary SIGINT moving down through the trunk of the steel box housing the Fed. He knew what it meant. Someone was inside the Fed, and whoever it was was typing.
He started to worry. He realized he needed Singerman’s help. There was no way to hack the Risch algorithm from the outside. The only way was for someone who knew how to get in to do so. Singerman had to get in and stop whoever it was.
Igor tapped his ear twice.
“Aaron, it’s Igor,” said Igor.
He heard nothing and waited, watching as signals activity from the Fed picked up.
“Aaron?” Igor repeated, but there was no reply.