McCorkell, Somerville and Ledoyen watched the news feed in silence. Listened to Jasper Brokaw’s speech. Stared at the screen as it cut back to the news anchors.
“That’s our next Zodiac cell right there,” Ledoyen said.
McCorkell looked from her to Somerville, who nodded that she concurred. He said, “What are the chances David Walker got a different tip-off to his son?”
“You think he lied to us?” Somerville said.
“It’s possible.”
“But why?” Ledoyen said. “Just because he wants Walker working separately to our unit? Or because David himself is running Zodiac. A puppet master of chaos.”
“Maybe,” McCorkell said.
“Maybe to what?” Ledoyen asked.
“All of the above.” McCorkell couldn’t yet see the trees for the forest. All the answers would be there. Could they figure it out within the thirty-six hours that this captive, Jasper Brokaw, just mentioned? Would they find Walker in time?
“Why?” Somerville said, then looked to Ledoyen. “You’re right. We need to know the why.”
“He lied to us, and he’s taken Walker,” McCorkell said, letting that possibility hang in the room.
“I’m not so sure,” Somerville said. “I’ve seen Walker hesitate—in England, remember?”
“A lot has happened since then,” McCorkell said. “And that’s not like Walker—he’d reach out and tell us, right?”
Ledoyen said, “Maybe he didn’t have a choice.”
“You really think his father picked him up and put him on this new threat?” Somerville said. “Told him to keep us in the dark?”
McCorkell looked at the screen and shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
•
Walker watched his father. As a kid he could remember thinking of him as a towering man. He recalled riding on his shoulders. Passing footballs and baseballs in the backyard in Houston. As a teen they’d moved to Philly so his mother could be around her extended family as her dementia worsened. Walker Snr had to travel a lot for work and had always kept an apartment in DC, to be near his government work and his Alma Mata, Georgetown, where he was an emeritus Professor, but he was home as much as he could be. That’s when, as a young man, Jed took the measure of his father as a man. He perceived his father to be an honest man. Someone who never skirted from a fight or argument to set things right. Hard working. Consistent. Appreciative.
The man looking back at him now: Walker wasn’t sure what he saw. The man who’d left Walker’s mother in a nursing home to die, her mind long dead before; even he was gone. This guy before him was an enigma. A former professional academic specializing in global affairs, who had guided all kinds of administrations in the way they shaped their foreign policy and intelligence doctrines, had packed up and faked a death and disappeared and was now either the key to unlocking Zodiac, or the driving force behind it. Either way, he knew more than he let on. Either way, Walker couldn’t trust him, but he had little choice but to take the chance, because he was the only link he had to Zodiac . . .
Zodiac. A program of terror cells that David Walker had developed in a DC think tank tasked to dream up worst-case scenarios that could damage, degrade and destroy the United States—a program that had in the past two years gathered a life of its own, perpetrators unknown, each terrorist attack initiating the next unlinked terror cell. So far Walker had succeeded in averting wide-scale damage during the first two attacks, but according to his father, ten more would follow.
And David was the key. A key that would not be decoded. Not here, not like this.
“That’s the next terror event?” Walker said. “Switching off the Internet?”
“Yes,” David replied. “That’s the goal. But getting there is going to be the nightmare—the journey there are the attacks.”
“Cyber attacks?”
“Yes.”
“Against critical infrastructure?” Walker said.
“That’d be the best bet. The quickest way toward chaos. But we don’t know, and you have to work to find out.”
“How?”
“You look. Listen. Do what you do.”
“Where do I start?”
“Think of all the hacks we’ve seen lately,” David said. “A few years ago we were hearing about General Dynamics being breached, the Chinese gaining access to plans to our new fighter jet. Then the Home Depot hack that exposed more than fifty million credit-card accounts. Sony. The Pentagon. Remember when someone hacked the Twitter feed of AP and reported a bomb had gone off at the White House and Obama was wounded?”
Walker nodded.
“A hundred and fifty billion dollars wiped off the economy in the three minutes it took them to broadcast it as a hoax,” David said. “We’ve seen major cyber criminal intrusions as front-page news—and that’s just what makes the news. With the world as connected and reliant on the Internet as ours is, everything is vulnerable. Everything is porous. And you realize there’s very little that can’t be hacked. Someone’s going to try to work their way into our networks and wreak as much havoc as they can over the next thirty-six hours.”
“Where do I start? I look at everybody on the planet who has a fast enough computer and the skills?” Walker said. “Hell—even kids are taught programming in elementary school.”
“True. But your focus will be narrowed.”
“Because of where the attacks are coming from? A nation state—Russia, China?”
David shook his head, said, “Inside the US.”
“By a US national?”
“Yes, although he’s held by someone—a group, maybe a foreign party.”
“They’re forcing him to hack us?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s running the counter-attack, NSA?”
“Homeland Security will be tasking elements of NS and FBI as first responders, but this will become military-led, fast. We’re in a different world now.”
“What do we know?”
“The first cyber attack is the data breach. The next is threatened to occur inside of six hours; more to follow over a thirty-six-hour period. But . . .”
“But?”
“It won’t get that far.”