Walker’s connection had watched the news, and she now sat with her father in the sitting room of his home. The air was humid and heavy. Neither father nor daughter had spoken for five minutes. Nervous tension arced between them. The house was dark, because all the curtains were drawn. Not for any reason other than practical safety. The coffee table before them held a jug of iced tea, two glasses poured, neither touched. Her father’s face was flushed. Anger, she figured. Anger that was soon replaced by a feeling of impotence, of being on the sidelines, of not being allowed to interfere. It wasn’t just that he was retired from military service. It was that this was not a military affair. That, and they were being watched.
The watchers were in the form of two Special Agents from the FBI, one in the kitchen and one seated in the hallway. There was another security presence, outside, where two police cruisers from the San Diego PD sat parked at each end of the residential street, screening all those who came and went. A quiet street, mainly retirees and a couple of military families.
We’re here to ensure your safety, the lead FBI agent had said upon arrival. You’re to stay here, under our supervision, until we hear otherwise. The assistant SAC from the LA Field Office will be here soon to discuss the matter further. In the meantime, you are to cease all communications—for your safety, of course, and that of Jasper, whom we are doing everything we can to locate and rescue.
So, this was what it felt like to be captive. Inside the house, sitting on a couch next to her father, Monica Brokaw felt numb. She’d seen the news feed and had not spoken since. Within twenty minutes the police had shown up, and five minutes after that, the FBI agents. She sat next to her father and watched the news. The volume was down because her father, hard of hearing from decades in the Air Force near fast jets, preferred to read subtitles. The newscasters were analyzing and dissecting what had been demanded in the face of a pending cyber attack. Experts were being questioned. Hypotheticals were being thrown about. None of them knew what they were talking about.
Monica glanced out the open doorway to the agent sitting in the hall. For our protection? she thought as the agent looked from the front door to the television, and back. Then why do I feel like a prisoner? I might as well be the one in the orange jumpsuit. And that won’t do. Not at all.
•
“A connection?” Walker said.
“I’ll get to that,” David replied.
“Time’s ticking, right?” Walker said. His father was silent. “Do we know the first target at least? A clue, something to go on, besides the fact that it will involve all government employees?”
“No. That was it.”
“Do we know who’s making the threat?”
“Partially.”
“China?”
“No.”
“If you’re going to tell me it’s some nerd in a basement—”
“No. This is quite real.”
“One person can really do this?”
“An insider can.”
“An insider? Like, an NSA guy or someone?”
“Exactly like an NSA guy. He’s hostage, his captors unknown and unseen.”
“And he’s on the news?”
“Yes. They’ve dressed him in an orange jumpsuit and all. Apparently he’s been through the ringer a bit.” Walker watched his father stretch out against the window frame. The old man had always had a bad back, the result of a childhood accident on the family farm outside Amarillo, and had suffered through multiple surgeries over the years. He’d heard his father claim that the injury was caused by a slip on a hoodoo in Palo Duro Canyon and Walker had vowed one day to get the truth. But not today. “You might know him, actually.”
“The NSA guy?”
“His name’s Jasper Brokaw.”
Walker thought about the name. Nothing. “No.”
David turned around. “You sure?”
“I don’t know the name at all. I’ve only ever met a handful of guys from the NSA. It sounds like this guy’s at the tech end, and aside from a couple of guys attached to a high-profile-target cell-phone tracking unit in Baghdad, I haven’t met any others. Certainly no Jasper. I’d remember that name. Friendly ghost, right?”
“Okay,” David said. “What about Brokaw?”
“Common enough name,” Walker said to him. There was silence for a moment, and Walker added, “You look tired, worn out.”
“So do you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
David merely nodded. Walker wondered how much his father knew about who was behind Zodiac. It was not that long ago that he’d been the one standing over his father, whom he had captured, in England. Now this. Could David Walker prevent all the Zodiac terror threats that he admitted to helping brainstorm years ago, when he was part of the intelligence system? Or was this it—doing whatever it was that he could from the shadows and directing his son to do the point-work?
“So, in the scheme of things, what’s the big deal with shutting down the Net?” Walker said. “I mean, turn it off, we switch it straight back on, right? Threat’s over. Close the guys out and prevent whatever threats they’re making. Use the opportunity to track them down.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Can’t be too hard if the President has the power to do it,” Walker said. “Having no Internet for a minute or two will be annoying, sure, it might cost billions of dollars to the global economy for every second it’s off. But that’s it—turn it back on, freeze whoever it is out, right? We use the full powers of the NSA and global partners to track down those doing the hacks. Problem solved.”
“It won’t be that easy,” David repeated. “I can’t be . . .”
Walker could tell his father’s mind was elsewhere, trying to catch up and piece together the threat.
“You wonder how I knew this was happening before anyone else?” he said, returning his gaze to his son. “How I had all this in play before you got to the airport?”
“Either someone told you—”
“No one told me.”
“Patterns? You’ve been watching them everywhere and you noticed something before anyone else? I don’t buy that. You’re not in the game anymore—you don’t have the resources.”
“Well, that’s what it is, buy it or not. I’ve spent a lifetime making contacts, building networks of watchers and listeners. I’ve had feelers out, and a line was tripped. Like a tripwire. Or more like a tsunami warning. I detected the tremors and can see what’s coming. Not specifically, but enough to predict that this is certainly the next Zodiac attack, and that it’s the real deal.”
“I want to see it. The tape of the hostage.”
“Two minutes. Two minutes and you will.”
“What happens in two minutes?”
“I leave. And you have a job to get on with.”
“Where are you going?”
“Look, Jed, this terror cell? This isn’t a series of hacks driven to infiltrate high-value political, economic and media locations in the US. It’s not going to be about attacking us and hurting us for the sake of it. I have to do what I have to do, and you do what you do. This certainly won’t be an escalation of hacks that have been going on for years out of China and Russia. This will be undertaken for one reason: to shut the Internet down—and to keep in down. It’s the end game, the worst-case scenario, and to get us there, there will be unimaginable chaos and costs.”
“No,” Walker said. “Not unimaginable. Because you imagined it. In your Zodiac war-game. You and countless other security boffins holed up in some ballroom in some hotel on the beltway. Someone there thought this up, and now look at where we are.”
“We must prepare for what might happen.” David shook his head. The guy looked so tired he might just keel over and sleep, right there. “That was the entire purpose of Zodiac.”
“In designing Zodiac, you didn’t prepare for hypotheticals. You designed a map to destroy the world. Can’t you see that?”
David sighed, said, “And you’re missing your connection.”