Zero day code, p.21
Zero Day Code, page 21
part #1 of End of Days Series
“Mister Maloney,” he said.
“Yeah, what do you fucking want?” Damo said.
Nick Perriam stepped between them, holding up one hand.
“Damien,” he said. “I should handle this.” He turned to the suits. “You can’t talk to Mister Maloney anymore, or to any of his staff. My firm has commenced proceedings against your agency. All correspondence must now go through your in-house counsel or the Justice Department, if they decide to get involved.”
The agent sneered at Perriam. “Whatever.” He turned and spoke to Damo. “I’m directed by my superiors to apologise for any inconvenience.”
“Any inconvenience!” Ellie blurted out. “Are you fucking serious?”
“I am informed that a malicious breach of our database resulted in your business being incorrectly targeted for enforcement action. I am not authorised to offer further comment. You are all free to go. Have a nice day.”
The two agents turned around and stalked off, chased by abuse shouted in Spanish, English and one roaring torrent of very loud Australian swear words.
21
The Cities Will Starve
“We’re up,” Michelle said.
“Wait. What?” James said.
He was still trying to navigate the information blizzard on her computer screen, while also chasing down the story of the banking collapse. It was weird. When he clicked the link on his phone, the New York Times piece came up with the latest update (“Federal Reserve Chairman Describes a Market in Meltdown”), but when he opened browser on his laptop and called up the Times, he could find no trace of the banking run.
“What do you mean we’re up?” he said, abandoning his attempt to reconcile the news sources on his computer with those on his phone.
“General Panozzo got us a three-minute slot at the NSC pre-con. You’re gonna explain your muffin theory to a room full of angry spooks and generals.”
“But it’s not just about muffins,” he protested. “The muffins are a metaphor.”
“Then find a better one,” she said without much sympathy. “This is a red meat crowd. And we’re up.”
Michelle grabbed her phone and hurried out the door as though she fully intended to leave him behind. Dazed and more than a little confused, James sat for a moment wondering what the hell an ‘NSC pre-con’ might be. Michelle stuck her head back into the room, as though reading his mind.
“It’s a pre-conference hook-up of all the principals who’ll have to brief the President at a full meeting in the situation room later. Or wherever they’ve stashed him now the Whitehouse has been flagged as a target.”
“A target for what?”
She rolled her eyes, as if that was answer enough.
“Hurry up, James, clock’s ticking.”
James tried to gather his thoughts while he grabbed his laptop and briefcase. Everything was moving so quickly. Part of him marvelled at the speed of it all. People in business often thought of bureaucrats as lazy and diffident, but this whole building seemed to have exploded into tightly controlled mania. People were hurrying up and down the halls, some of them running, but they all seemed focussed and goal directed. Unlike him.
He had no idea what he was doing.
Dozens of soldiers clad in body armour and carrying weapons had appeared as if by magic and stationed themselves at seemingly random checkpoints throughout the building.
He was sure the points weren’t random, but their meaning was a mystery to him, at least until two of the soldiers barred their passage into a conference room to scan their ID tags with handheld readers. The device pinged as a green light came on.
“Good to go, folks,” said the one in sergeant’ stripes, as he unlocked and held open the door for them.
James followed closely on Michelle’s boot heels, half expecting to be dragged back out of the room by the scruff of his neck. The door closed firmly behind him.
The conference room was twice the size of the one they’d visited earlier in the day and contained nearly three times as many people. There were many more military uniforms than he’d seen this morning, and the men and women wearing them looked collectively older and way more senior. James had no idea what all of the decorations on their chests and shirt collars and shoulder tabs meant, but he was immediately struck by the density of the display. The civilians were likewise represented by an expanded phalanx of power players in the sort of bespoke, hand-tailored suits he’d expect to see on Wall Street. Having lost his suit jacket, he was acutely aware of how underdressed he looked in his rolled-up shirtsleeves.
A woman in a red cardigan and pearls was stepping down from the podium at the head of the long, crowded table as they entered. Why a cardigan in this heat, James wondered fretfully, pointlessly. Maybe she worked with a planet-sized CIA supercomputer that needed to be kept super-chilled. He never found out.
General Panozzo half-stood and hurriedly waved them both forward as if to catch a departing train. James’s heart, which was already hammering away in his chest, beat even faster. What the hell was he supposed to say to these people? He’d barely been able to make his case to Panozzo earlier. And he hadn’t been given a chance to refine the message at any White House briefing. It had been cancelled.
Stumbling along in Michelle’s wake, fearful of tripping over his own feet, let alone the tangle of legs and briefcases barring their way to the podium, James was terrified of face-planting into some admiral’s crotch before he had a chance to humiliate himself more conventionally at the lectern. Michelle did not even wait for him to catch up before she addressed the room.
“Good morning,” she said. “I am Michelle Nguyen, Division 6, National Security Council. This is James O’Donnell, one of our consultants. He identified a threat vector in yesterday’s cyber-attack which hasn’t yet featured in public or classified reports. James?”
And she yielded the floor to him.
Shit!
“You have two minutes, max,” she whispered as he half staggered past her. Dark sweat stains stood out on his shirt and he was pretty sure he was the worst smelling guy in the room.
“Uh… hi,” he said, only stopping himself from nervously tapping the microphone by sheer force of will. “Uh, yeah.”
And he froze.
He had no idea where to start, no idea of where to go. Panozzo was frowning at him. Michelle nodded encouragingly. The whole room waited.
Muffins weren’t going to cut it.
James took a deep breath, let it out and said a little too loudly, “Our cities are going to starve.”
That got a reaction. A rippling movement that ran around the table and the room like a series of competing, overlapping Mexican waves at a football stadium. He heard grunts and mutters and somebody distinctly asking, “What did he just say?”
James wasn’t sure who asked that, but he turned in the general direction of the voice he’d heard.
“I said our cities are going to starve. The cyber-attack yesterday was significant in itself, but it was more significant as a distraction…”
No that wasn’t the right word for these people.
“… As a diversion,” he added, “from a focussed… attack on the country’s food distribution network.”
“How?”
The question came from an Air Force general a few seats down the table on James’s left. Or at least he assumed it was an Air Force general. He wore a blue uniform, like on Stargate, which his Dad had always loved. And the room was full of generals and admirals.
“Hackers got into the servers, the computers, of all the main food distribution companies in the continental US. If they take those systems down, like really smash them, it would be like…”
He reached for a better metaphor and drew a bank. James was hideously aware of how exposed he looked, and felt, in front of a room full of really fucking serious people. He found the words just as his search for the right phrase was becoming uncomfortable, with some of his audience beginning to shift in his or her seat.
“It’d be just like bombing and completely destroying a railway network in a war,” he blurted out. “And taking out roads, ports, everything all at the same time. The food that should have moved from the farm gate to your dinner table, or the TV dinner factory to your lap, it’ll just sit and rot where it is because the way you normally move it, the transport and distribution network, it’s gone.”
He made a little explosion noise and mimed something blowing up before he had a chance to regret it.
More murmuring, more movement around the table.
Michelle winked at him, which was weird, given the circumstances. Panozzo nodded brusquely, once and said, “Thank you Mister O’Donnell.”
And he was done. A younger officer in a tan brown uniform appeared from off stage to escort them to an exit in the nearest corner of the conference room. He heard Panozzo talking about “getting Homeland and NSC on it, ASAP,” and then they were through the door and standing in a smaller room, where half a dozen aides and functionaries typed frantically on laptops, ignoring their arrival. Michelle turned and gave him a punch on the shoulder.
“Boom! Nailed it,” she said.
Still struggling to understand how all of the moving parts worked together James shook his head.
“But I just… we didn’t really…”
“We’re just the messengers,” Michelle explained and pointed at the door that had just closed behind them. “They decide what to do with the information.”
“And what are they going to do?” James asked.
She shrugged.
“Under normal circumstances, it’d get kicked across to the Cyber Response Group. They’d work up an attribution memo and then stakeholders, US agencies, allies and partner nations would confer on defense and response and…”
“Jesus Christ,” James said. “We’ll all be dead of hunger before then.”
“I said under normal circumstances, James. Chances are they’re ordering a bunch of lethal drone strikes on every hacker in the CIA’s Hostile Disposition Matrix and a compulsory hold and secure over the IT assets of the food distributers.”
“Wait. What? Every hacker?” James said, not quite believing her. “But isn’t… isn’t this the Chinese? Who else would they go after?”
Michelle said nothing.
James stared at her, feeling as though he was teetering on the edge of a vast abyss which had just opened up inside his own head.
“What have I done?”
Michelle Nguyen smiled. It was not a reassuring expression.
There were drone strikes. Eighty-three of them. And extraordinary renditions. Twelve of those. And even three very messy, old-fashioned hands-on killings by wet work teams put together under CIA control and despatched to lay the vengeance of the Republic upon its enemies.
All too late, and often misdirected.
The assassination teams would not even leave the US for another three days, and all of their targets were in eastern Europe. None had anything to do with the PLA.
As Chinese drones serviced US military targets across the Asia-Pacific region, and the great fleets of People’s Liberation Army Navy sortied into the South China Sea, a lieutenant of Unit 61398 received authorisation to proceed with the attack on America’s food distribution network. Four seconds after he hit the Enter key on his laptop, the IT systems of nine American food wholesalers melted down into unusable slag. In a small irony, some of the malware he unleashed was adapted from the Stuxnet worm written by the US, with Israeli help, originally programmed to destroy thousands of centrifuges used in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. Rewritten by Unit 61398, it caused more than a hundred automated warehouses of five of the larger food distributers to violently dismantle themselves in a collective fit of robot madness. Mostly, however, six different types of malicious software infiltrated the companies’ various stock control systems. Rather than deleting the data, the malware aggressively randomized it before locking up the databases with military grade encryption.
The severity of the attack and the enormity of its consequences explained the lethality of the US response. In addition to all of the drone missions, snatch teams and hit squads, the President authorised cruise missile strikes on the known locations of Unit 61398 facilities.
But that would not come for another week.
Well after the food riots in dozens of American cities turned deadly.
22
The Revels of the Condemned
The bar was busy. Crowded and noisy. But Jonas kept hearing the same things over and over again.
“Cash only.”
“No plastic.”
“I said we’re only doing cash sales, Pete.”
Big Al’s had stepped back in time. No credit cards. No swipe and pay. No contactless. Just good old fashioned greenola.
“Not for you, sir,” the waitress told him, when he tried to pay for his beer with one of Mikey’s five-dollar notes. “Al said everything’s on the house for you. Drink up.”
It was tempting, an open bar, a magical tab that would never need paying off, but Jonas restrained himself. He needed to keep his wits about him. Shit was getting out of hand, and not just in Silverton. The crowd at Big Al’s was roaring so loud that he couldn’t hear a word coming from the TV screen over the bar. But it was tuned into a local news show and the news ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen, read like the subtitles to a disaster movie.
DOLLAR IN FREEFALL
TRADING ON WALL STREET SUSPENDED
NATIONAL GUARD CALLED OUT IN TWENTY-THREE STATES
6 POLICE AMBUSHED AND KILLED IN DALLAS
Oh, and something about a fucking WAR WITH CHINA?
He noted the question mark. That was a helluva thing. Not knowing whether you were in a war or not. How fucking soft in the cock had this country gone?
Needless to say, there was no reporting anywhere of his big reveal on the pod. Nobody cared who’d fucked whom in Hollywood anymore. Jonas gave up trying to follow the dozen chaotic threads on the TV. The images told him enough. It was like something from one his crazier podcasts. A prophecy of collapse, war and an unholy bloodswarm of chaos and revolt, all rolled into one convenient bulletin. Most telling of all? For him, at least? Nobody even looked sideways at a stranger in town, carrying hundreds of dollars in a bag full of cash.
Everyone was cashed up. Like Germany in 1930.
Jonas tried to keep to himself, sitting at the end of the bar, nursing a locally brewed pale ale, and carving into the monstrously large T-bone the kitchen had sent out on Big Al’s say-so. Al himself was nowhere to be seen, having been sent to bed under doctor’s orders. But the staff had their own orders to make sure Mister Murdoch was made to feel at home, and he couldn’t go more than a minute without some local sidling up to shake his hand, pat him on the back or offer to buy him a drink for “saving poor Al”, “takin’ care of business,” or “wiping that shit stain clean off of the streets.” Jonas made an effort to remember the names of his kind of people. So far he’d committed three to his mental contact app. Brad Rausch from the auto shop. (“Damn but you fucking showed that wetback.”) Dale Juntii, an ex-Marine. (“If we’d built a fuckin’ wall we wouldn’t have to keep stomping these roaches.”) And Tomi Yates, a design student who looked like a Fox News hottie, who leaned in close to breathe gin fumes and cigarette smoke into his ear while she told him that in the olden days, “a real sheriff would’ve hung that fucking wetback from a tree.”
Jonas wasn’t sure whether it was Tomi’s breasts rubbing up against his arm, her casual out-loud statement of racial truth, or the unexpected feel of her hand on his thigh under the bar, but he found himself suddenly dizzy with lust.
Not stupid with it though.
He’d grown up in a small town and he knew women like this. Knew the sort of assholes who usually claimed them as their own, too. Somewhere in town, if not in this bar, there’d be a two-hundred-and-forty-pound slab of football hero or wannabe outlaw, and his fucking posse, and no matter what Jonas had done to put himself in the town’s good graces today, those boys would kick him to actual pieces for laying hands on Tomi Yates. Indeed, Jonas knew, they’d be looking for an excuse. Small town heroes didn’t like to share the spotlight.
He kept his hands in plain sight, holding his knife and fork to either side of his dinner.
“Then maybe I should run for sheriff,” he smiled at her, ignoring the discomfort of his growing erection.
Her smile did nothing to cool him down.
“You think you’ll hang around then?”
Jonas shrugged, but held her gaze.
“I could be tempted.”
“I’ll bet you could,” she grinned, turning a few inches to block the sight of her hand sliding onto his crotch and squeezing gently before she laughed throatily and wandering off to re-join her friends. She would totally have a table of friends somewhere in this heaving crowd. All the hottest bitches in town.
Jonas breathed in and out. On the TV, images of talking heads, politicians mostly, cut away to scenes from a military base where fire crews fought a blaze burning in the conning tower of a submarine. He shared pleasantries and accepted thanks from another half dozen locals while finishing his steak. He’d relaxed considerably about the prospects of any legal trouble following him out of Seattle. From what he could see of the news, the cops were gonna be tied up with the end of the fucking world for at least a week. It’d be a while before things calmed long enough for anybody to follow up on reports of simple assault and theft.
The black and brown slums of LA were already burning with riots.
Jonas allowed himself a brief, quiet snort of laughter at that.
If he was gonna fuck up—and he could admit that losing his shit at work and stealing Mikey’s beloved bike and vacation money was a fantastically stupid fuck up—today was surely the day to have done it.
He’d even fallen ass-backwards into a free cot. Al Barrett had not only comped him a steak dinner and all the beer he could drink, he’d told Jonas he had a bunk in one of the guest rooms for as long as he wanted it. Big Al’s operation ran to more than food and drink. He had sixteen rooms for rent out back and they were larger and more comfortable than the dump Jonas had been living in with Mikey. The main bar and restaurant ran to tourist kitsch, with a lot of artfully rusted old sawmill shit on the walls, and an eight-foot-tall stuffed grizzly in one corner. But the accommodation was clean and comfortable, and surprisingly upmarket. The sheets on his double bed felt like expensive cotton, and somebody had left him a picnic basket full of preserves, smoked meats and local sweet treats. A handwritten note said, ‘With thanks from Silverton’. Still, Jonas didn’t imagine he’d stay around more than a day or so, even with the dangerous temptation of Tomi Yates to consider. He’d made a clean break and he needed to keep going. The news would calm down the way it always did and he could take another run at Disney and Pendleton. His zen cool was so chill that when Sheriff Dave sidled up to him a few minutes later, Jonas waved at the barstool next-door and invited the lawman to sit down and have a drink.
