The Paris Option - Страница 17

The giant warrior nodded as he followed the small terrorist, who glided from the room, his feet seeming barely to touch the carpet, soundless.

Folsom, California

The attack began at six p.m. in the headquarters of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) in the small prison town of Folsom, east of Sacramento. Cal-ISO was an essential component of the state's power system and integral to the movement of electricity throughout California. Although it was May, Californians were already worrying that summer might bring the return of rolling blackouts.

One of the operators, Tom Milowicz, stared at the dials of the big grid. "Jesus Christ," he breathed.

"The numbers are spinning south. Into the toilet!"

"What are you saying?"

"It's too much, too fast. The grid's going to crash! Get Harry!'

Arlington, Virginia

In a secret installation across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, the elite computer specialists of the FBI cyber team quickly determined the catastrophe to be the work of a hacker, country of origin still undetermined. Now they battled to bring the California power grid back online and stop the hacker's progress. But as the team discovered, it was already too late.

The hacker had written" compiled" software that allowed him or her to shatter the tough firewalls that usually protected the most sensitive parts of the Cal-ISO power system. He had bypassed trip wires, which were intended to alert security personnel to unauthorized entry, had bypassed logs that pinpointed intruders while they were committing an illegal infiltration, and had opened closed ports.

Then the extraordinarily adept hacker had moved on, invading one power supplier after another, because Cal-ISO's computers were linked to a system that controlled the flow of electricity across the entire state. In turn, the California system was tied into the transmission grid for the whole Western United States. The invader hacked from system to system with phenomenal speed. Unbelievable, to anyone who did not witness it.

Lights, stoves, air conditioners, heaters, cash registers, computers, ATMs, breathing devices all machines, from luxury to life-giving, as long as they required electricity went dead as power to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Denver suddenly ceased.

Outside Reno, Nevada

The battered old Chrysler Imperial of Ricky Hitomi rocked with the shrieks and laughter of his five best friends as it powered down the rural blacktop through the night. They had met at his girlfriend Janis Borotra's house and smoked a few joints in the barn before all piling into Ricky's heap. Now they were heading for more fun at Justin Barley's place. They were high-school seniors and would graduate in a week.

Occupied with their wild partying, their minds dulled with weed, none saw or heard the fast-moving freight train in the distance. Nor did they notice that the gate at the crossing was still up, the warning lights dark, and the alarm bells silent. When Janis finally heard the screaming train whistle and shrieking brakes, she shouted at Ricky. It was too late. Ricky was already driving onto the rail crossing.

The freight train blasted into them and carried the car and their battered bodies a mile before it could stop.

Arlington, Virginia

Panic spread in the secret FBI cyber installation across the Potomac River from the nation's capital. A decade ago, the nation's telephones, power grids, and emergency 911 number and fire dispatches had been separate systems, individual, unique. They could be hacked, but only with great difficulty, and certainly the hacker could not get from one system to another, except under very unusual circumstances.

But deregulation had changed all that. Today hundreds of new energy firms existed, as well as online power traders, and everything was linked through the multitude of telephone companies, whose interconnections also had resulted from deregulation. This vast number of electronically joined entities looked a lot like the Internet, which meant the best hackers could use one system as a door to another.

Defeated by the power and speed of the hacker, the FBI experts watched helplessly as switches flipped and the violent mischief continued. The velocity at which firewalls were breached and codes blown shocked them. But the worst aspect of the nightmare was how quickly the hacker could adjust his access code.

In fact, it seemed almost as if their counterattack caused his code to evolve. The more they fought him and his computer, the smarter his computer became. They had never seen anything like it. It was impossible horrifying. A machine that could learn and evolve far faster than a human thought.

Denver, Colorado

In her penthouse atop the opulent twenty-story Aspen Towers apartment building, Carolyn Helms, founder and CEO of Saddle Leather Cosmetics for Western Men, was entertaining her business associates at an intimate birthday dinner her forty-second. It was a joyous occasion. She had made them a lot of money, and they were a great team, anticipating an even more exciting and lucrative future.

Just as her longtime close friend and executive vice president George Harvey toasted her for the third time, she gasped, clutched her heart, and collapsed. George fell to his knees to check her vital signs. Her treasurer, Hetty Sykes, called 911. George began CPR.

The paramedic rescue team of the Denver Fire Department arrived within four minutes. But as they rushed into the building, the lights went off and the elevators froze. The building was in complete darkness. In fact, from what they could tell, the whole city was. They searched for the stairs. As soon as they found them, they began the long run up twenty stories to the penthouse.

By the time they arrived, Carolyn Helms was dead.

Arlington, Virginia

Phones rang in the secret Virginia headquarters of the cyber crime squad.

Los Angeles: "What in hell happened?"

Chicago: "Can you fix it? Are we next?"

Detroit: "Who's behind it? Find out pronto, you hear? You'd better not let this happen in our court!"

One of the FBI team shouted to the room: "The main attack came through a server in Santa Clara, California. I'm tracking back!"

Bitterroot Mountains on the Border Between Montana and Idaho

A Cessna carrying a party of hunters home with their meat and trophies landed neatly between the double row of blue lights that marked the rural strip. The Cessna turned and taxied toward a lighted Quonset hut, where hot coffee and bourbon were waiting. Inside the little plane, the hunters were cracking jokes and recounting the successes of their trip when suddenly the pilot swore.

"What in hell?"

Everywhere they could see, all electric lights had disappeared the runway, the little terminal, the Quonset hut, the shops and garages. Suddenly there was a noise, hard to distinguish over the sound of their own plane's engine. Then they saw it: A landing Piper Cub, owned by a bush pilot, had veered off course in the darkness. The Cessna pilot pulled hard on his stick, but the Piper was going so fast there was no escape.

At impact, the Piper burst into flames and ignited the Cessna. No one survived.

Arlington, Virginia

A dozen FBI computer forensics specialists were analyzing the initial attack against Cal-ISO, looking for signs of the hacker. The cyber sleuths scanned their screens as their state-of-the-art software analyzed for footprints and fingerprints the trail of hits and misses all hackers left behind. There were none.

As they labored, power returned inexplicably, without warning. The FBI team watched their screens with disbelief as the Western states' massive complex of power plants and transmission lines throbbed back to life. Relief spread through the room.

Then the chief of the cyber team swore at the top of his lungs. "He's breaking into a telecommunications satellite system!"

Paris, France

Wednesday, May 7

A harsh buzzing shattered Smith's instantly forgotten dream. He grabbed his Sig Sauer from under his pillow and sat up, alert, in a pitch-black room filled with alien odors and misplaced shadows. There was a faint spattering of rain outside. Gray light showed around the drapes. Where was he? And then he realized the buzz came from his cell phone, which rested on his bedside table. Of course, he was in his hotel room, not far from the boulevard Saint-Germain.

"Damnation." He snatched up the phone. Only one person would call at this hour. "I thought you told me to get some sleep," he complained.

"Covert-One never sleeps, and we operate on D.C. time. It's barely the shank of the evening here," Fred Klein told him airily. As he continued, his tone grew grave: "I've got unfortunate news. It looks as if Diego Garcia wasn't an atmospheric glitch or any other malfunction. We've been hit again."

Smith forgot his rude awakening. "When?"

"It's still going on." He told Smith everything that had happened since Cal-ISO went offline. "Six kids are dead in Nevada. A train hit their car because the crossing signal was out. I've got a stack of notices here of civilians who were hurt and killed because of the blackout. There'll be more."

Smith thought. "Has the FBI traced the attack back?"

"Couldn't. The hacker's defenses were so swift it seemed as if his computer was learning and evolving."

Jon's chest tightened. "A molecular computer. Can't be anything else. And they've got someone who can operate it. Check whether any computer hackers are missing. Get the other agencies on it."