Albatross (23 page)

As she walked into the Andover town offices, she walked with authority and purpose—all attitude. With laptop carefully encased in its case, she also managed to carry a clipboard tucked under her arm. She was still dressed in her police academy uniform, but she wasn’t wearing the jacket and cap now. With the Commonwealth of Massachusetts seal on her starched white shirt and the official manner in which she presented herself, she was able to sail right to the information center of the public building. There, she asked the senior-citizen volunteer attendant where the town manager was and then headed toward the stairwell to his office. Once in the stairwell, Samantha went the opposite way toward the basement and easily found the junction for the telephone and Internet connections.

“Not much of a challenge,” Samantha said to herself. No one questioned her.
All that practice acting paid off
, she thought.

Having the building plans and schematics was helpful, to say the least. The absence of internal and external surveillance devices made this public facility the most vulnerable to her next actions. Now it was time for the difficult part. She had to quickly disconnect the main junction of the Internet cable, place a split to reconnect the cable so that the FBI computer would regain access to the Internet. Electronics was not her thing; Burns had shown her this bridging-and-splicing technique. She was able to return the favor by teaching him how to insert an intravenous line without bruising the patient too badly.

Samantha had typically sent a text to her colleagues when she had completed a task. Breaking from this pattern, Samantha sent a text to Becky just prior to sending the worm: “White bishop to send package to our friends. Time for black bishop to move out. Bravo out.”

Samantha imagined all the poor public employees that were in the middle of something online and lost the connection for a few moments; she did feel a little bad about it.

Once the laptop was attached, she logged on to the bureau’s official website. Then she took out the flash drive and connected it to the laptop. Two more clicks, and she unleashed a worm right into the FBI’s website. Officially, she could now be charged with attacking a federal agency. As she completed the final stages of her task, she could have shut the laptop and taken it all with her, but that was not the plan. She left the laptop in place, still attached to the system. She then extracted a block of high-grade explosives. The explosives did indeed look very dangerous, especially with a digital timing device taped to the open laptop. Anyone seeing it would run away first and not try to disconnect it.

Samantha remembered when she had stolen the FBI laptop. Even then she knew that once she had lifted the laptop from the pair of federal agents in that coffee shop, she had started a cascade effect of an orchestrated attack. Somehow, by actually sending a worm right to the FBI and leaving the laptop open for them to easily find, this act seemed more deliberate. At the moment, though, Samantha felt really bad for anyone on a computer in the building. Right now, their software was betraying its operating system and was about to send all files, pictures, and official and personal e-mails out to the world indiscriminately, and then all those files would simply disappear from their hard drives. And then to add insult to injury, the passwords for all their computers would change, effectively locking them out so that they could only watch the carnage on a frozen screen. Then she regrouped and collected her empty bag and clipboard and finally locked the door behind her on her way out. Once she was in the hallway, she began hearing raised voices yelling expletives and asking, “Why!” As she exited the building, she could still hear the escalating voices from the building and the attached middle school, which apparently shared the same computer servers. Children cried out, “What the fuck! I lost everything!” But she kept marching. She was committed. “So,” Samantha said to herself as she felt justified in this overt act of war, “this is what a terrorist feels like.” Saying it out loud made it more real.

This worm was about half as bad as the one that would be directed to the operations center later on. As Samantha looked back to the town buildings, she pulled at her fitted gloves and entered the waiting car. Her next stop would be near the junction of the interstate and off-ramp to await Becky’s signal.

The FBI’s regional office in the Boston had been very busy all morning when the attack came. Deputy Director John Helms was in the bureau’s control room, watching a number of events occurring just outside his proverbial doorstep. He was watching a series of events that, he was convinced, were connected all unfold on a floor-to-ceiling monitor that was segmented into smaller monitors. These monitors showed all the images and the writings in Arabic, and it also displayed all the possible leads that his analysts were pursuing. Maybe someone would see a pattern.

Helms was a twenty-year veteran of the FBI and knew enough to know when attacks were coordinated or not. These definitely were. He was a big man who could still do the majority of his US Marine drills, and he kept his hair short and his hands ready. Even though he was in great shape for a fifty-five-year-old marine who was now retired, he still needed medication for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. He would often have to reassure his wife that if two wars had not killed him, the stress of his job would not either. Today, he was glad he had remembered his medication and had gotten his workout done early that morning. There was no way he could have slipped away to get a cup of coffee now, let alone go for a run.

Helms stood in the middle of his control room, looking at the monitors and listening to the low din of his analysts working. He liked his team very much, but many of them were not experienced; even fewer had a military background. These young people were smart, but they were much more comfortable with tablets and smart phones than hand-to-hand combat and semiautomatic weapons. Helms shifted his thinking to take an inventory of what he had accomplished so far today. He had been on the phone with all local, state, and federal agencies, and he was now coordinating all deployment efforts to find out what was going on. He had his people take the lead with the North Reading Police on the FBI shootings. He had the state police, bomb units, hazmat units, and all local police in the towns of Lawrence and Andover with support from adjacent communities focusing on the attacks at the hospital, the development across from the hospital, and a smoking truck that looked like it had been filled with explosives and a possible chemical agent. He had spent the past hour with the state governor to release the National Guard to all possible state, local, and federal targets, and he even had police academy cadets out in force to assist with traffic and civilian evacuations in the Merrimack Valley. His boss in DC, who was more of a politician than field agent, wanted more proof that this was indeed an attack. It took an hour for his communication teams to locate the signals and transmissions of a “remarkably disturbing text messages indicative of either a foreign or domestic terrorist attack.” When the text messages were all put together, including the one that had come in a few minutes ago, it ran like a special forces assault team script:

“Black knight in place. White knight on the move. Alpha out.”

“Alpha, Charlie. White bishop on the move. Bravo out.”

“White bishop secured transport. Black bishop, you are a go. Bravo out.”

“Black bishop has delivered the package and is on the move. Heading to lair. Charlie out.”

“White bishop to send package to our friends. Time for black bishop to move out. Bravo out.”

“Alpha and Bravo rendezvous complete. Package exchanged. Alpha is on to prime objective, and Bravo to launch point two—out.”

”Message received. Prepping for launch at primary location. ETA is 10:00 a.m. Charlie out.”

His boss agreed that the chain of command would need to be scrambled and that the president would determine if all US Armed Forces, domestic and abroad, would have to be put on a heightened state of alert. The National Emergency Alert System might need to be used to alert the citizens.
How do you alert people without causing panic?
Helms thought. He banished the question so that he could focus on his task of containing the crisis to the Northeast of the United States or preferably to the three communities in the Merrimack Valley. But Helms was beginning to feel hopeful that he might be able to actually get ahead of future attacks and possibly capture the ones responsible. Now that they had the frequency and general location of the cell phones, a new transmission could be discovered as it was being sent. If the text was long enough, he might be able to narrow in on the terrorists’ location. Helms was convinced that terrorists were behind these events.

“I hate terrorists,” Helms muttered.

With nearly all of his resources and staff deployed either in the field or crammed behind computer screens, he thought the analyst shouting for him would give him good news.

Helms approached the young analyst.
They are all so young
, he thought.

Helms steps were quick, and he spoke curtly as he approached the analyst. By the time he got to his bank of monitors, he remembered her name was Gilmore. Gilmore might have been the second oldest analyst there. Maybe he was thirty.

“Give me good news, Gilmore,” Helms demanded

“Director, I have a text coming through now. I was able to get a location on it. It came from a public building or near a public building.” Gilmore’s eyes never left his three monitors. One monitor had the actual text with time and date code: “White bishop to send package to our friends. Time for black bishop to move out. Bravo out.”

On one monitor, there was an actual aerial image of the location, and the other had a map with all the buildings located in the area.

“Sir!” Gilmore and Helms were alarmed when they saw that the signal was right outside of a middle school. Helms was not going to have any civilians, especially a school of children, show up on this evening’s news, children engulfed in flames or chemicals, not on his watch!

Helms bellowed the following orders: “Peters, Thompson, Davenport, Jakes, reroute local PDs to evacuate the school and buildings within a five-block radius of that last signal. Call the school and building now and get them out of there. If there are any bomb, hazmat, or SWAT units left, redirect them there. Kelly, get—”

Helms never finished his last thought as his attention was suddenly drawn to a desperate cry of another analyst ten feet behind Gilmore. Johnson was his name, Helms recalled. Maybe he was thirty too.

“Sir! I got something coming over one of our laptops. It’s been logged on for the last five minutes, and it has a real bad worm that’s hacking through our firewalls.” Johnson was surfing three monitors as Helms approached.

“Get moving, everyone,” Helms reiterated so that they would start his prior orders before a list of potential tragedies became tonight’s news.

Johnson picked right back up as Helms approached.

“This looks like some kind of Trojan worm. It was not picked up by any of our firewalls, security, antispyware, or antibotware or anything. Somehow, it just slipped through and sat there for a few minutes. It looks like it’s a combination of Conflicker and Nimbda worms. I bet you this is either North Korean or Chinese.”

Again, there were more interruptions. A voice from five rows away yelled out, “I can’t get into my computer. It’s not recognizing my password.”

“Mine too,” another voice said. “It just asked me for my password and denied me.”

“Sir!” This voice was from Janeson. Helms knew she was the oldest agent there. She was thirty-two with military experience and absolutely no people skills. While strikingly attractive, she was socially awkward. She was, however, remarkably smart. All questions were typically answered by her. Helms hoped she had an answer this time.

“My computer froze, and I am now watching my folders on my desktop disappear. I recommend we shut everything down; desktops, laptops, servers, everything.”

He knew Janeson would have an answer.

“I’m losing my entire hard drive. No, wait … my external hard drive is deleting all my files too,” another voice said.

Gilmore turned to look at Helms, nodded quickly, and said, “We need to unplug everything now.”

Helms looked at Janeson, who was not waiting for him to give the order. She was already on her knees under her desk, pulling plugs out to disconnect her computer and peripherals. Johnson followed suit.

“Everybody! Unplug everything! Crepes and Martin, get out to the exterior offices and spread the word. Davenport and Thompson, get down to the servers and shut them all down!”

Helms did a double take of Martin.
Why is an agency accountant in my control room?
he thought. Helms returned to his next steps.

As Helms was about to give the next set of orders, he became distracted by what he first saw on one of the smaller monitors. The screen was changing from sharp images to fuzzy white. Helms then shifted focus to watch the floor-to-ceiling monitor’s images start to pixelate, freeze, and then slowly fade away. That was a nerve-racking sight. He had seen the big monitor switch off before for maintenance. It would typically turn off in sections with a crisp snap. This was very different. Similar to the smaller monitors, the big monitor and anything with a monitor or screen tied into the FBI Internet began to freeze, pixelate, and then slowly fade away. No clean snap. Just a slow fade to darkness with an evaporating afterimage and then a blank screen. It took maybe sixty seconds for every screen to eventually go dark.