When he checked the other stations, they were all more or less the same, running constant diagnostics on the trunk lines, scanning to make sure each one was operational and keeping track of how much data was being pulled across.
And that was it.
Nothing remotely nefarious. No hint of sabotage or domestic terrorism or even just a line of suspicious code.
Everything looked squeaky fucking clean, which stank.
Jake dropped heavily into one of the chairs. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk in front of him.
So what’s the point? What’s the endgame if these computers are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do?
That didn’t make sense. Why break in? Why leave sentries to make sure everything ran smoothly if you hadn’t done
something
?
Which meant they must have done something, surely?
It wasn’t worth breaking in to make sure the relay station was working. Too much risk for too little reward. He needed to think about rewards. What could you stand to lose if the trunk lines failed?
Getting up again, he hobbled over to the nearest trunk line and studied it carefully, training the flashlight over every inch of its housing. He couldn’t see any obvious breaches, not even a scar in the casing, which meant they hadn’t tried cracking it open. No physical tampering with the lines left only the computers.
He went back to a terminal and navigated his way around the diagnostic program, but again, everything looked
exactly
the way it should.
Until Jake saw it—the anomaly between the time and the volume control.
It took him a second to realize what it meant: there had been something there before, or there was something there now that was hidden.
Sure enough, he found an active connection in a hidden new terminal window. There was a short menu, including things like,
Throttle Bandwidth, Static Burst, Resume
, and, more ominously,
Block
. This Trojan, working away in the background, appeared to offer the terminal’s user an override on the main system, effectively giving them control of the trunk lines, including the ability to shut them down.
This had never been about destroying the trunk lines—it had been about control. And now they basically had it. Seven deaths at this location—nine if you included the ones at his hand—and they may have taken over all transatlantic communications. That was a price he was sure they’d been happy to pay.
Shame he’d turned up. They might have gotten away with it.
He right-clicked through the menu options again until he found the one he wanted:
Deactivate
. Jake highlighted the option, but stopped short of making it a reality. The moment he killed the Trojan those guys would lose their back door into the trunk lines, but they’d also know about it pretty much immediately. That being the case, they’d rain down fire on this place like a biblical plague. He needed to be smarter than that. If he could be.
The first few notes of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” scared the living crap out of him. Laughing at himself, Jake reached for his phone. Using
The Exorcist
’s theme song for his ring tone had been a bit of joke, but sometimes it went off at the absolutely worst times imaginable, bringing back a flood of associated memories.
He saw the blocked number notification.
Ryan.
“What you got for me?” Jake said as he answered.
“Been digging, like you asked.” Ryan’s tone was considerably more somber than on the last call. “We’re talking about some fucked-up shit, bro. This ain’t good. I kinda wish you hadn’t called.”
Jake was nodding even though there was no way the other man could see it. “I know. Least I’m beginning to understand. So, talk to me.” Jake turned away from the monitor, keeping an eye on the door while they spoke.
“You were right, they were fucking around with those computers. My first thought was how weird it was they were even on, what with the power outages—I mean, nothing else in that entire building is working apart from that bank of machines. Ain’t no coincidence there, right? Gotta be a point to it. I figured maybe they hacked into some accounts, transferred funds or stocks or some shit.” Jake was still nodding, that made sense. It was the same direction his mind had been working. “But that ain’t it, man. They haven’t dicked with that stuff at all. I mean, not a dime.”
That didn’t make sense. “So what did they do?”
“Two things. I almost missed the second one, clever motherfuckers. First, they set up a lag—a time delay—a three second stutter, basically meaning anything you do, it takes three seconds to register in the system. A fuck of a lot can happen in three seconds if you’re a computer. Your average computer these days can do one hundred and fifty million million floating point operations per second. If you know what you’re doing, that’s basically enough time to make your computer psychic. From the outside looking in, it can see into the future because it’s really the past. Three seconds worth of it. Think Malaysian Airlines—news breaks that the Russians have taken out a second plane, those stocks are tanking, but your machine’s now got a three-second head start on the trades. You don’t take a hit. You get to dump stuff clean. It’s better than insider trading. It’s fucking genius, kiddo. Three seconds is an eternity with the kind of processing power they’re pulling down. That was the second thing, the one I almost missed. The first? They’d slipped in a Trojan that opened a back door right into the heart of the system, giving them control of pretty much everything from anywhere in the world. Couple that with the delay, and you’ve got a serious breach.”
“It’s the same here,” Jake said.
“Where’s here?”
“International relay station. All the trunk lines run through here. They’ve got a Trojan in here that essentially controls the flow of traffic down the line.”
“He who controls the spice controls the world.”
“What?”
“Nothing, dude. Thinking aloud. Looking at their setup here, I figure they can monitor the whole stock exchange through this hack. And they’ve got a three-second delay between it and the real world in terms of functionality. That means they can block trades or alter them on the fly—whatever they want, it’s all there to be fucked with and the fucking’s good, y’know? It’s all just bits and bytes.”
“Can you disconnect it?”
“Wish I could,” Ryan answered. “But it’s rooted in deep. I’d have to strip everything down just to get at it. And if they’re good enough to do that, they’re good enough to have some shit-hot security around their hack. Put it this way: I love you like a brother, man, but I sure as hell don’t want whoever’s behind this tracing
anything
back to me.”
“No worries. I owe you one.”
“It’s all good,” Ryan replied. “Listen, I gotta bounce.”
“Later,” Jake said, and hung up. He turned back to face the screen, tapping the edge of his cell phone against his forehead, thinking.
So these guys take down Fort Hamilton first. Stage one. Then they go after the stock exchange. Stage two. Now they’ve taken control of the trunk lines. Stage three. Two questions: why, and what’s next?
Why was obvious, on the most basic level: to take control.
Hitting the fort had sidelined the military, at least locally, so no help was forthcoming from that quarter until the choppers and whatever else brought in backup. That was smart. The stock exchange meant they now controlled the money—not a bank, which has all kinds of security to prevent break-ins and robberies, but something a lot safer and more insidious and far-reaching in its influence. It was also the fastest way to turn a profit if they could see into the future when they placed their bets. The trunk lines meant communications, particularly with anyone overseas. The only thing left was transportation. This was the logical stage four. Transportation networks.
This was a huge one, and it made sense: they could control the money and the chatter, as long as there wasn’t a military presence, but more soldiers could be flown in. And plenty of New Yorkers could get out, running to someplace safe, rats deserting the sinking city to let those left behind clean up the mess.
Which meant stage four: shut down all the ways in and out of the city.
The airports would be first.
But you couldn’t just hit them in isolation, you’d have to go after the trains as well. And the roads too, to be safe, but the complete snarl of abandoned vehicles had turned Manhattan into an atrophying corpse, the arteries clogged with gas guzzlers going nowhere, so even if the Army tried to bus in reinforcements they’d have to use tanks to bulldoze their way through the streets. It all took time—the one thing they didn’t have.
Logically, there were six primary targets: Penn Station, Grand Central, Port Authority, LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark Airport.
But there was only one of him. He could call Ryan back, get some extra feet on the ground. That would cross one off the list, but it meant he would still have to cover five.
That was a problem.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“HEY, CHRISTIAN! DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE?”
Christian Eikner glanced up, his frown turning into a begrudging smile as he realized who was interrupting him. “For you, always.” He waved a hand at the others he’d been talking to and broke away from their little group, stepping toward her. “Been awhile, how’re you doing, Finn?”
“You know how it is, all work and no play makes Finn a dull chica.” She shook her head, shrugged, then smiled. “You?”
Christian rubbed a hand over his head. She wasn’t sure if he was basically saying he’d lost a few more hairs, or if he was trying to flatten out the few errant ones that remained.
He was a nice guy, and regularly joked that Bruce Willis and Patrick Stewart had made him cool. She’d never had the heart to tell him not even an industrial freezer could make him cool. Cool just wasn’t in his DNA.
“Not too bad, but as you can imagine, we’re a little busy trying to keep the lights on everywhere,” he said with that self-deprecating grin of his. She looked over his shoulder to where his coworkers were waiting impatiently for him to be done flirting. He seemed to sense the daggers being aimed at his back. “So, what’s up?”
“I have a question and I figure you’re the one person I know who could answer it.”
“I always like questions I can answer. Fire away.”
She wasn’t sure of any other way to say this, she wasn’t even sure what, exactly, she was thinking, but it seemed to make sense in a crazy way and she just wanted him to tell her she was wrong so she could drop it. “This is going to sound nuts, but do you think there’s been a shift in the magnetic poles?” He looked at her, and for a moment she expected him to laugh. He didn’t. She pushed on: “I’m thinking about the blackouts, obviously, but the animals too, the birds falling from the sky, the stampedes from Yellowstone, the dogs, the shoals of fish. The end-of-the-world stuff. All of it.” She had his full attention.
“I’m going to ask you a question in return, Finn: where did you hear about this?” His usual easy-going, affably shy demeanor vanished. He seemed . . . what? Angry?
His friends were staring. One of them started toward the two of them.
Great, an audience.
“I remembered something I heard in a lecture,” she explained quickly, trying to marshal her thoughts into some semblance of order. “This history professor was talking about significant natural events and how they’ve shaped our world and our culture. It was about the nature of societal collapse—how things didn’t have to be asteroids from the sky and huge extinction events to end a society as we define it.”
“And that got you thinking about polar shifts?”
“During part of the lecture he mentioned the last polar shift, which was, what, maybe forty thousand years ago? Sometime during the last glacial period?” Christian nodded, confirming her time line. “But one of the things I remember most vividly was how he said early man would have been confused by the change in animal behavior, but because civilization as we know it was basically in its infancy, they would have adapted to the change fairly quickly, whereas if something like that happened as recently as twenty thousand years ago, when civilizations were much more developed, entire societies could’ve fallen.” Again Christian nodded, but not so much confirming she was headed in the right direction, more like he was encouraging her to go on. “So, anyway, it struck me . . . the blackout, the sheer scale of it, is way too big to be some sort of global terrorism at play, so it’s got to be natural, right? Because something
has
screwed with electronics. I’m not a physicist, but couldn’t something like a polar shift explain what’s happening out there?”
“Not exactly,” Christian said, “but you’re not entirely wrong, either. Definitely on the right track.” He turned to his friends, who were now loosely surrounding them. “Gents, I’d like to introduce you to Finn Walsh, a friend from Art and Archaeology.” He gave her a sheepish smile. “You’re not going to believe this, but we were actually just discussing the possibility of a polar shift when you saw us. We were busy congratulating ourselves about being the first to come up with the theory, so obviously when you mentioned the exact same thing my first thought was panic. I mean, the last thing we want is somebody stealing our thunder, so to speak.” A couple of the others laughed. Finn rolled her eyes.
“A bad-weather joke from the meteorology department? Why am I not surprised?” But she focused on the rest of what he’d said. “You think it was a polar shift?”
There were a couple of nods from the group.
“We think so, yeah,” a tall, thin woman with a long rope of red-blond hair answered. “But obviously most of our equipment got fried so we’ve got no way of being sure. We’re trying to cobble some stuff together so we can run a few tests.”
“Okay, stupid-question time: if that’s what happened, what can we do?” She got a lot of blank looks in response. “Let me rephrase that: is there
anything
we can do? Or do we just have to get used to the fact that north is south?”