Rules of Vengeance (30 page)

The world exploded into a ball of blazing light. A spasm racked his body, arching his spine and locking down his lungs. A fire ignited inside his chest and shot upward into his head. It was a violent, searing heat that burned his eyes and expanded relentlessly inside his skull. His every muscle tensed. His heart thudded crazily, and he felt as though his brains were going to be expelled through his ears and eyes. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. He remained frozen, his face contorted into a rictus of death.

And then it passed.

The pressure in his head subsided. The heat receded and he could see clearly. He drew a breath, his heart hammering inside his chest. He lay still as the pounding subsided. Finally he stood.

At once the imperatives of his predicament came back to him.

He hurried down the hall into Lazio’s office. The floor was empty. Lazio was gone. He scooped up the hospital records, made his way back to reception and out the front door. As he came onto the landing, he heard the squeal of tires leaving rubber. He craned his neck and caught sight of a pair of taillights receding into the distance.

Jonathan gulped down the warm night air. He looked both ways, then turned left and ran up the street, away from the city.

Toward Civitavecchia.

   Mischa Dibner, director of Nuclear Safety and Security for the International Atomic Energy Agency, Austria, sat alone at the head of the conference table deep in the catacombs of Thames House. Her hands were clasped on the desk, her posture without reproach. She was a fierce, pixie-ish woman with a helmet of henna-colored hair and a complexion as pale as a Kabuki mask, with shiny black marbles for eyes. Her record showed that she was fifty-six, a Hungarian by birth and German by marriage. But her English was an American’s and hinted at long years spent in the United States.

Graves made the appropriate introductions. After inquiring as to her health and thanking her for venturing forth from her hotel so late at night, he got down to business. “What prompted your decision to visit London at such short notice?”

“We’d detected a problem with our security networks.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Are you familiar with our work at Nuclear Safety and Security?”

“I’ve worked with some of your colleagues regarding pirated radioactive materials,” said Graves. “Uranium, plutonium, the like. Until I learned about the stolen laptops, it had crossed my mind that that might have been the reason for your visit.”

“I’m afraid not. The reason for our trip is more in line with another of our mandates that has to do with ensuring the safety of nuclear installations—both how they’re run and how they’re protected.”

Kate looked at Graves, who returned her glance coolly.

“We’re not worried about a physical attack,” Dibner continued. “You could crash a 747 into the containment building of any plant in Europe and it would more or less bounce off. Absolutely nothing would happen. Short of a concentrated military assault with laser-guided munitions, we’re safe. Even then, it would be difficult to provoke any large-scale release of radiation that would harm the civilian population. The reason for our trip has to do with cybersecurity.”

“Hacking into a plant’s control systems?” asked Kate.

“That’s where the greatest risk factors lie. Think of each plant as a castle with four concentric rings of defense.

“To get from one ring to the next you must navigate through firewalls that get more and more impenetrable as you near the innermost ring.

“The outermost ring is the Internet. The second ring is the local area network—a firewall that protects the plant from outside incursions. The next ring is the most important. It’s called the Plant Control System, or the PCS. Remember, all radioactive materials reside inside the reactor vessel, and it’s there that the steam is generated to run the turbines and create energy. The PCS monitors all control systems to keep the process within safe boundaries. Every system is monitored by four separate computers, or four redundant systems. If two of these computers detect an operating error, they trip the safety systems.”

“That’s only three rings of defense,” offered Graves respectfully.

“The fourth is the Reactor Protection System. And, should all else fail, there is the Engineered Safeguard System. By that I mean the actual machinery inside the plants that physically prevent an incident if the PCS were to fail. But it’s the Plant Control System that has us worried.”

“Has there been an incursion?” asked Kate.

“Not as such. But there have been attempts. All you need to know is that someone was able to get past a firewall at three different plants.”

“Just how far past?”

“Far enough. We caught the incursion instantly. They never got close to being able to issue one command on their own. We have too many fail-safes in place. As a last resort, we can take manual control of all systems and thwart whoever is trying to break in.”

“Any luck tracing where the hacker originated the attack?” asked Graves.

“None.”

He continued: “Does that mean that you came to Britain because one of the compromised plants was in the UK, or was there another reason?”

“One of the plants was at Sellafield, though we’d like to keep that information under wraps.”

“I see,” said Kate. “So Robert Russell’s communications with you had nothing to do with your trip?”

At the mention of Russell’s name, Mischa Dibner’s face fell. “Who told you about him?”

“Did you know that he’d been killed?” asked Kate.

“I saw it in the newspaper. I was disturbed.”

Kate went on: “In the course of our investigation into his death, we came upon information that he had reached out to you. Is that accurate?”

“It was Russell who alerted me to keep watch for forays against our systems.”

“Can you be more specific?” asked Graves.

“He said that he’d learned of a state-sponsored plan to get inside a plant and cause damage. He thought the target was probably in continental Europe, and he was most insistent that it would take place very soon. But he refused to hint at who was behind the plan.”

“And why did you believe him?”

“Because in the past three months we’ve had over a hundred cyber-attacks against our plants and he was able to name nearly every one. In my book, he’d established his bona fides. We’d planned on meeting yesterday morning to go over ways we could tighten our security.”

“At One Victoria Street?” asked Graves.

Dibner nodded. “I didn’t learn about his death until after the bomb against Ivanov.”

“Ivanov was a decoy,” said Graves. “The attack was a coordinated bid to force you and your team to leave the building and then steal the laptops while you were gone.”

“That’s impossible. No one apart from the six members of our team knew about the meeting.”

“And your higher-ups?” suggested Kate. “I imagine you had to clear the visit with the director general.”

“We’d never do anything of this nature without his approval.”

Kate smiled understandingly. “How long ago did you float the meeting?”

“Seven days.” Dibner sighed and seemed to shrink on the spot. “I see what you’re driving at. Of course you’re right. A good many people knew about the trip. Let me assure you both that I passed along Russell’s warnings and that we’ve seen no unusual behavior anywhere to indicate that an accident is imminent.”

“Until the laptops were taken.”

Dibner swallowed hard as the realization hit home.

There came a knock at the door. An assistant entered, carrying a tray of coffees, and handed them around. Graves sipped his appreciatively. “Well, then, what do the laptops contain that would make them the object of such a well-planned operation?”

Dibner smiled ruefully. “Correspondence, field inspection reports, confidential country assessments, personnel information. I can’t begin to imagine everything that is on them.”

“Anything especially sensitive?”

“God, yes.” Dibner looked up, her black eyes sunken deep in their sockets. “Several of them were holding emergency codes that allow the IAEA to circumvent every cybersecurity measure I described to you.”

“What good will they do someone?”

“In theory, whoever possesses the codes can access the control room of any nuclear plant in the European Union without triggering an alarm. The codes were put in place to allow professionals to operate the plant from a safe distance in case of an emergency. But I wouldn’t worry. As soon as we discovered the laptops were missing, we activated a kill switch, sending a command that effectively obliterated their hard drives.”

“And how soon was that?”

“We were allowed back into the building at five p.m.”

“Six hours,” said Graves.

“More than enough time for someone to make a copy of the hard drive,” said Kate.

“Even with the codes, it’s impossible to precipitate an accident. Those plants are staffed with the best-trained engineers in the world. The moment they noticed something awry they would take manual control of the plant. The final say will always remain in the control room. With men and women. Not with machines.”

Graves pushed back his chair and stood. He helped Mischa Dibner with her coat and showed her to the door. Kate accompanied her down the hall. “Mrs. Dibner, why do you think someone would go to such an effort to get the codes if they really can’t do any harm once they have them?”

“In this game, knowledge is everything,” replied the director of Nuclear Safety and Security at the IAEA. “Maybe by stealing the codes, these people hope to gain an insight into current safety measures. Perhaps they just wanted to make us feel vulnerable.”

The trio paused at the elevator bank. The doors slid open and Mischa Dibner stepped inside. “Remember this—if you want to hijack a nuclear plant, you can’t do it from outside. You have to put someone on the inside. In the control room. And that, of course, is impossible.”

   Emma Ransom lay flat on her belly in the tall coastal heather, a pair of Zeiss night-vision binoculars to her eyes. Perched on the cusp of a sandstone bluff, she stared down at a complex of large buildings fronting the ocean some 800 meters away. There were three sets of buildings separated by intervals of 50 meters. From the exterior, each was identical to the next, so much so that it appeared that they were exact copies of one another. Each comprised two principal structures: a rectangular four-story building built of black steel set closest to the ocean, and, abutting it to the rear, a massive concrete block topped with a stout domed cylinder and a slim smokestack.

The complex was named La Reine. The Queen.

In technical jargon, La Reine was an EPR (evolutionary power reactor) or pressurized water reactor, capable of generating 1600 megawatts of electricity. In simpler terms, it was the world’s most advanced nuclear power plant, a marvel of modern science able to provide energy to over 4 million inhabitants twenty-four hours a day.

To Emma, it was “the target.” And nothing more.

Exchanging her night-vision binoculars for a camera equipped with a 1000-millimeter telephoto lens, she snapped off a dozen pictures. She was not interested in the buildings per se. She could download a hundred pictures of the plant from Électricité de France’s website anytime she cared to. Instead she aimed her camera at the fences surrounding the complex. There were no pictures of these on the Internet. Set concentrically with 20 meters separating them, the fences were electrified and topped with razor wire. A stainless steel box was welded to every third fencepost. These, she knew, were self-powered security relays monitoring the hundreds of pressure sensors set in the ground at regular intervals around the plant’s 3-kilometer perimeter. There was no way over or under them.

Replacing the camera in its bag, she traced the perimeter of the complex. She was dressed in black from head to toe. A microfiber cap concealed her hair. Nonreflective camouflage paint covered her face. Careful to maintain a distance of 100 meters from the outer fence, she reached the road that led into the plant. She knelt to listen for traffic. The air was still, the night frantic with the sawing of crickets. In the distance she heard an engine start up. A truck, she guessed, as the vehicle lurched through its gears. A Klaxon shattered the calm, and she heard the clatter of a gate sliding on its track. A moment later the truck drove past. It was a large flatbed rig, the kind used to deliver the uranium fuel rods that powered the reactors. Emma waited until its taillights had disappeared, checked back in the direction of the plant, then stepped forward. Just then a motorcycle rounded a curve, coming from the opposite direction. She threw herself into the grass, landing hard on her belly.

“Damn it,” she cursed.

Like all nuclear plants, La Reine operated at full staffing and full capacity twenty-four hours a day. There were five teams in all. At any one time, two were on call and one was in training. The clock was divided into two shifts. The “front end” ran from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The “back end” ran from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Day or night, the plant was humming with activity. She could not afford to be careless.

When her heart had slowed, she peeked from the grass and looked in both directions. Certain that no traffic was approaching, she dashed across the asphalt and disappeared into the clumps of sea grass on the other side. Bent low, she continued moving for several minutes, raising her head every few steps to monitor her position.

It was not long before she spotted a low-slung building within its own fencing. Several jeeps painted olive green sat parked in front of it. This was the barracks. Every nuclear power plant maintained a paramilitary force of between seven and fifteen men. Most were former military personnel and were proficient in the use of automatic weapons and antitank guns as well as shoulder-held ground-to-air missiles.

Emma continued past the barracks, too. They were not part of her tactical considerations, and thus held no interest for her. She had no intention of waging a pitched battle against a superior force.