“The grid is the key,” Monica said, reading the words they had transcribed. “You can stop it. Come to me, not online. I’m at the place we always wanted.”
“What’s that mean?” Walker said. “‘The place we always wanted.’”
“I’m thinking,” Paul said, looking absently at the television. “I’m thinking.”
“What’s ‘the grid’?” Monica said.
Paul’s gaze didn’t move.
“Power grid,” Walker said. “That’ll be their end game. Shut the country down—but not until we’ve all seen and heard about their previous attacks.”
“Jasper could be anywhere,” Paul said. “We used to talk crap about all kinds of places.”
“We should move,” Walker said. “Think elsewhere.”
“I was going out the window to the back,” Paul said.
“We can’t all do that,” Walker replied.
“How’d you guys get into the building, past the cops?”
“Some friends helped, but they’ll have moved on by now,” Walker said, knowing that Doolan’s bluff would have only worked for so long and that they would have had to leave their post by now. “We’ll head out the front door, one at a time. Right past the cops. A minute apart.”
“I can go out the window and send the harness back up.”
“We can sound the fire alarm,” Monica countered. “Evacuate with the rest of the building. It’s Sunday evening, there are probably a hundred people in here.”
Walker nodded, but he didn’t like it. And it had to be the front door, because he’d had Doolan check the service door at the rear and it had been locked and alarmed by the police. The idea of spending time using Paul’s climbing gear and going up and down from the roof or out a window had little appeal, especially because he was unsure if Monica was fully functional.
“If the fire alarm goes off, the cops will be suspicious,” Walker said, “and they’ll scan every face. If we go out one at a time, we’re each just a person leaving. They never suspected that someone is up here.”
“Okay, so we go out the front,” Paul said, unclipping his climbing gear.
“Wait,” Walker said, catching Paul’s arm. “Before we leave the building, tell me: what do you know about the General of Cyber Command.”
•
“Listen up,” Harrington said over their tactical radio earpieces. “I know you’re all pissed at what happened to our boys. You’ve every right. But revenge will come later. This isn’t just about Monica Brokaw anymore—we need to get Paul Conway alive too. He’s now priority number one. Got that? He knows something about Jasper Brokaw’s abduction, he’s an asset.”
“What about Walker?”
“You do what you have to do. If he’s a threat, drop him.”
•
Jasper punched in the commands. His fingers hesitated a moment. He knew what would happen. The attack was routed through servers in eastern Europe and eventually stopped in Russia. He hit enter.
The US response to the cyber attack on a critical government system would be instantaneous.
Monster-Mind.
The nation’s first and last line of defense for dealing with cyber attacks. It detected an attack, and retaliated with a greater than proportional response, most often completely crashing the attacker’s computer networks, wiping data and creating back doors in firewalls for future remote access. Sometimes it even crashed entire ISPs, even national Internets, as it did in Syria.
Jasper knew it because he had helped develop it.
But what now? What would the Russian response be, when Monster-Mind hit back?
And would that finally be enough to force the US President’s hand in using the kill switch?