The President Is Missing: A Novel (19 page)

“…need to wake him.”

“He’ll wake up when he wakes up.”

“My wife says to wake him up.”

Far above me, the surface of the water. Sunlight shimmering on the rippling waves.

Swimming toward it, my arms flailing, my legs kicking.

A rush of air into my lungs, and the light so bright, searing my eyes—

I blink, several times, and squint into the light on my face, my eyes slowly coming into focus.

Focus on Augie, sitting on the couch, wearing shackles on his wrists and ankles, his eyes dark and heavy.

Floating, time meaning nothing, as I watch his eyes narrowed in concentration, his lips moving slightly.

Who are you, Augustas Koslenko? Can I trust you?

I have no choice. It’s you or nothing.

His wrist turning slightly, almost imperceptibly. Not looking at the iron shackle. Looking at his watch.

His watch.

“What time…what day…” I start forward, stopped by pain in my neck and back, an IV protruding from my arm, the tube strung along behind me.

“He’s awake, he’s awake!” The voice of Carolyn’s husband, Morty.

“Mr. President, it’s Dr. Lane.” Her hand on my shoulder. Her face coming between me and the light. “We performed a platelet transfusion. You’re doing well. It’s 3:45 in the morning, Saturday morning. You’ve been out for a little over four hours.”

“We have to…” I start up again, leaning forward, feeling something under me, some kind of a cushion.

Dr. Lane presses down gently on my shoulder. “Easy now. Do you know where you are?”

I try to shake out the cobwebs. I’m off balance, but I definitely know where I am and what I’m facing.

“I have to go, Doctor. There’s no time. Take out this IV.”

“Whoa. Hold on.”

“Take out the IV or I will. Morty,” I say, seeing him with his phone to his ear. “Is that Carrie?”

“Stop!” Dr. Lane says to me, the smile gone. “Forget Morty for one minute. Give me sixty seconds and listen to me for once.”

I take a breath. “Sixty seconds,” I say. “Go.”

“Your chief of staff has explained that you can’t stay here, that you have somewhere to be. I can’t stop you. But I
can
go with you.”

“No,” I say. “Not an option.”

She works her jaw. “Same thing your chief of staff said. This IV,” she says. “Take it with you in the car. Finish the bag. Your agent, Agent…”

“Jacobson,” he calls out.

“Yes. He says he has some wound-control training from his time with the Navy SEALs. He can remove the IV when it’s done.”

“Fine,” I say, leaning forward, feeling like I’ve been kicked in the head six or eight times.

She pushes me back. “My sixty seconds isn’t up yet.” She leans in closer. “You should be on your back for the next twenty-four hours. I know you won’t do that. But you must limit your physical exertion as much as possible. Sit, don’t stand. Walk, don’t jog or run.”

“I understand.” I hold out my right hand, wiggle my fingers. “Morty, give me Carolyn.”

“Yes, sir.”

Morty places the phone in my hand. I put it to my ear. “Carrie, it’s going to be today. Get word to our entire team. This is my formal acknowledgment that we are to move to stage 2.”

It’s all I need to say to get us ready for what we are about to face. Under “normal” disaster scenarios, at least those occurring after 1959, I would reference the DEFCON levels, either for all military systems worldwide or for selected commands. This is different—we are facing a crisis never conceived of in the fifties, and pieces must be set in motion in ways far different from what we would do during a conventional nuclear attack. Carrie knows exactly what stage 2 means, partly because we’ve been at stage 1 for two weeks.

Nothing from the other end but the sound of Carrie’s breath.

“Mr. President,”
she says,
“it may have already started.”

I listen, for two of the quickest—and longest—minutes of my life.

“Alex,” I call out. “Forget driving. Get us on Marine One.”

J
acobson drives. Alex sits next to me in the backseat of the SUV, the IV bag perched between us. Augie sits across from me.

On my lap is a computer, open to a video. The video is satellite footage, looking down on a city block, an industrial area in Los Angeles. Most of the block is consumed by one large structure, complete with smokestacks, some kind of large factory.

Everything is dark. The time stamp in the corner of the screen shows 02:07—just past two in the morning, about two hours ago.

And then fireballs of orange flame explode through the roof and the side windows, rocking and ultimately caving in the side of the industrial plant. The entire city block disappears in a cloud of black-and-orange smoke.

I pause the video and click on the box in the corner of the screen.

The box opens onto the full screen, which itself is split three ways. In the center screen is Carolyn, from the White House. To her left is acting FBI director Elizabeth Greenfield. To Carolyn’s right is Sam Haber, secretary of homeland security.

I’m wearing headphones plugged into the laptop, so the conversation from their end will reach only my ears. I want to hear this first, in full, without Augie overhearing.

“Okay, I saw it,” I say. “Start at the start.” My voice is scratchy as I shake off the hangover from the treatment and try to focus.

“Mr. President,”
says Sam Haber.
“The explosion was about two hours ago. The blaze has been enormous, as you can imagine. They’re still trying to get it under control.”

“Tell me about the company,” I say.

“Sir, it’s a defense contractor. They’re one of the Defense Department’s largest contractors. They have a number of sites around Los Angeles County.”

“What’s special about this one?”

“Sir, this plant builds reconnaissance aircraft.”

I’m not making the connection. A defense contractor? Recon planes?

“Casualties?” I ask.

“We believe in the tens, not the hundreds. It was the middle of the night, so basically just security personnel. Too soon to know for sure.”

“Cause?” I ask, careful to limit my side of the conversation.

“Sir, all we can say with certainty is a gas explosion. Which doesn’t automatically suggest a hostile actor. Gas explosions happen, obviously.”

I look up at Augie, who is watching me. He blinks and looks away.

“There’s a reason I’m hearing about this,” I say.

“Sir, that’s correct. The company reached out to Defense. Their technicians insist that something, somehow, reset the pump speeds and valve settings. Sabotage, in other words, that produced pressures that overwhelmed the joints and welds. But it wasn’t done manually, there in person. Those places have tighter security than government offices.”

“Remotely,” I say.

“Sir, that’s correct. They think it was done remotely. But we can’t yet say for certain.”

But I bet I know who could. I peek over at Augie, who glances at his watch, unaware that I’m watching him.

“Suspects?” I ask.

“Nothing obvious to us yet,”
Sam says.
“We have ICS-CERT looking into it.”

He’s referring to DHS’s cyber-emergency response team for industrial control systems.

“But we know this much, sir. The Chinese tried to hack into our gas pipeline systems back in 2011, 2012,”
he says.
“Maybe this means they succeeded. If they exfiltrated credentials from a system user, they could do whatever they wanted inside the system.”

The Chinese. Maybe.

“I guess the number one question is, do we think…”

I glance at Augie, who is looking out the window.

Carolyn says,
“Could this be Dark Ages?”
She understands my reluctance to say too much in front of Augie. Once again, she’s right there with me, reading my thoughts, finishing my sentence so Augie won’t hear it.

I’m asking the question because I want to know.

But I’m also asking because I want to hear the secretary of homeland security’s response. Sam is one of the circle of eight who know about Dark Ages. Carolyn didn’t leak it. Liz Greenfield didn’t leak it. I’ve ruled out two of the eight.

Sam Haber is one of the six I haven’t ruled out.

Sam lets out air, shakes his head, like it feels wrong to him.
“Well, Mr. President, Ms. Brock just informed me that we have reason to believe that today is the day.”

“Correct,” I say.

“She didn’t tell me our source for that information.”

“Correct,” I repeat. My way of saying,
And we’re not going to tell you the source, Sam.

He waits a beat and realizes that more will not be forthcoming. Cocks his head, but otherwise doesn’t respond.
“All right, well, sir, if that’s the case, then I acknowledge that the timing is suspect. But still, I must tell you that this feels different. Dark Ages is malware, a virus we discovered.”

Well, we didn’t exactly discover it. They—Augie and Nina—showed it to us. But Sam doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that Augie even exists.

Or does he?

“But this—this seems to be a more conventional method, like spear-phishing,”
he continues.
“Trying to compromise a company executive, lulling him into opening an attachment on an e-mail or clicking on a link, which installs a malicious code that lets the hacker gain access to credentials and all kinds of sensitive information. Once you exfiltrate credentials and have that kind of access, you could do all sorts of things—like what happened here.”

“But how do we know that’s different from Dark Ages?”
Carolyn presses.
“We can’t say that Dark Ages didn’t come from spear-phishing. We have no idea how the virus got on the system.”

“You’re correct. I can’t rule it out yet. It’s only been a couple of hours. We’ll get right to work on it. We’ll get an answer ASAP.”

ASAP
has a new meaning today.

“Mr. President,”
says Sam,
“we’ve reached out to all the gas companies about pipeline security. ICS-CERT is working with them on emergency mitigation protocols. We’re hopeful we can stop this from happening again.”

“Mr. President.” Alex nudges me. Our SUV has reached the helipad in eastern Virginia, the majestic green-and-white Marine helicopter illuminated only by the lights around the pad.

“Sam, I’m going to let you get back to it for now,” I say. “Keep Carolyn and Liz in the loop at all times. And only them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir. I’m signing off.”

Sam’s third of the screen disappears. The screen adjusts, and Carolyn and Liz appear in larger images.

I turn to Alex. “Get Augie onto Marine One. I’ll be right there.”

I wait for Alex and Augie to leave the SUV. Then I turn to Carolyn and Liz.

I say, “Why would they want to blow up a defense contractor’s airplane plant?”

I
have no idea,” says Augie when I ask him the same question.

We are sitting inside Marine One, seated across from each other in lush, cream-colored leather seats, as the helicopter lifts silently into the air.

“I am not aware of any such action,” he says. “I played no part in such a thing.”

“Hacking into a pipeline system. Or a defense contractor’s system. You never did things like that?”

“Mr. President, if we are speaking generally, then yes, we have done such things. You are talking about spear-phishing, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes, we have done these things. The Chinese perfected the art initially. They attempted to hack into your gas pipeline systems, did they not?”

The same point Sam Haber made.

“This is a matter of public knowledge, what the Chinese did,” says Augie. “But we did not do that here. Or I should say,
I
did not do that.”

“Is Suliman Cindoruk capable of hacking into our pipelines without you?”

“Of course he is. He has a team of such people. I would say that I was probably the most advanced, but we are not speaking of something that is difficult. Anyone can load a virus onto an e-mail and then hope that the target clicks on it.”

The Wild, Wild West, this cyberterrorism. This new, scary frontier. Anyone sitting on a couch in his underwear could undermine the security of a nation.

“You never heard anything about Los Angeles.”

“No.”

I sit back in my chair. “So you don’t know anything about this.”

“I do not,” he says. “And I cannot understand what would be to gain from blowing up a company that builds airplanes for you.”

I can’t disagree. What purpose would it serve to destroy a manufacturing plant?

There has to be something more to this.

“Okay. Okay, Augie.” I rub my eyes, fighting off exhaustion from the platelet transfusion, fighting off exasperation at constantly not knowing what is coming next. “So tell me. Tell me how you infiltrated our systems, and tell me what damage it will cause.”

Finally we have the chance. Since we first met at the stadium, what with dodging bullets and escaping from car ambushes and my collapsing near midnight, we haven’t had the chance to lock this down.

“I can assure you that our efforts were not so rudimentary as sneaking viruses into e-mails and hoping someone would open them,” he says. “And I can assure you that your code word ‘Dark Ages’ is an appropriate one.”

I
force down some coffee on Marine One, hoping to snap out of the medication-induced fog. I have to be on my game, 100 percent. This next step could be the most critical of all.

Dawn is just breaking, the clouds a magnificent fiery orange. Ordinarily I’d be deeply moved by the sight, a reminder of the omnipotence of nature, of how small we are in this world we inherited. But the clouds are instead a reminder of the fireball I just watched in Los Angeles via satellite images, and the rising sun tells me that the clock is ticking in deep, echoing gongs.

“They’re ready for us,” Alex Trimble tells me, looking up at me from conversations he’s having through his headset. “The communications room is secure. The war room is secure. The grounds are swept and secure. Barricades and cameras are in place.”

We land effortlessly in a spot designed for helicopter landing, a square of open land among the vast woodlands of southwestern Virginia. We’re in the middle of an estate owned by a friend of mine, a venture capitalist who, by his own admission, doesn’t know a damn thing about what he calls “computer-technical stuff” but recognized a winner when he smelled it, investing millions in a start-up software company and turning those millions into billions. This is his getaway, his place to fish on the lake or hunt deer when he’s not in Manhattan or Silicon Valley. More than a thousand acres of Virginia pines and wildflowers, hunting and boating, long hikes and campfires. Lilly and I came here a few weekends after Rachel’s death, sitting on the pontoon, taking long walks, trying to find the secret to coping with loss.

“We’re the first ones here, right?” I ask Alex.

“Yes, sir.”

Good. I want at least a few minutes first, to put some pieces in place and clean myself up a bit. There is no room for error now.

In the next few hours, we could be altering world history for generations.

South of our landing spot there are paths leading to the boat dock, but otherwise all you can see is dense woodlands. North of us is a cabin built more than a decade ago out of white pine logs, the color of the wood having turned over the years from yellow-brown to a darker orange that almost matches the sky at dawn.

One of the best things about this place, particularly from Alex’s perspective, is its lack of accessibility. There is no way to enter this property from the south or west, because it is protected by a thirty-foot-high electric fence fitted with sensors and cameras. The east side of the property abuts a massive lake, which is guarded by Secret Service agents standing on the dock. And to access the property by car, you have to find an unmarked gravel road off the county highway, then turn down a dirt road barricaded by Secret Service vehicles.

I insisted on light protection, because this location must remain secret. What is about to happen has to remain completely confidential. And the Secret Service tends to stand out when it’s in full force—it’s intended to stand out. We’ve struck a good balance between secure and inconspicuous.

I walk on unsteady legs up the slight incline, carrying the IV stand in my hand because the wheels do not comfortably roll across the thick grass. The air out here is so different, so fresh and clean and sweet with the scent of wildflowers, that I am tempted to forget for the moment that the world may be on the brink of catastrophe.

On one side of the open lawn, a tent has been set up, all black. If not for the color, and the fact that a drape covers all sides, it would look like any other tent set up for an outdoor party. Instead it is a tent set up to allow private conversations, either in person or electronic, to occur in utter seclusion, jamming out all other signals, any attempts at eavesdropping.

There are going to be a lot of critical and confidential conversations today.

The agents have the cabin open. Inside, the rustic theme has been retained to a large extent—some wildlife trophies mounted on the walls, pictures hung in pine frames, a carved-out canoe serving as a bookcase.

A man and woman stand at attention as I enter, taking note of the IV in my arm but saying nothing. The man is Devin Wittmer, age forty-three, looking like a college professor—a sport jacket and trousers, dress shirt open at the collar, his long hair brushed back, some gray peppering the beard covering his thin face—otherwise youthful in appearance but with bags under his eyes that reflect the stress he’s endured over the last two weeks.

The woman is Casey Alvarez, age thirty-seven, slightly taller than Devin and with a bit more of a corporate-America look—her ink-black hair pulled back, red eyeglasses, a blouse and black pants.

Devin and Casey are the cochairs of the Imminent Threat Response Team, part of a task force I assembled after the virus we dubbed Dark Ages made its cameo peekaboo appearance on Pentagon servers two weeks ago. I told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost.

We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA.

Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits.

But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them.

“Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups.

I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better.

There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

“Devin and Casey can show you to their war room,” I say. “And they’re in touch with the rest of the threat-response team back at the Pentagon.”

“Follow me,” says Casey to Augie.

I feel a small measure of relief. At least I’ve got them together. After everything we went through, that itself is a small victory.

Now I can focus on what comes next.

“Jacobson,” I say once they’ve left. “Remove this IV.”

“Before it’s finished, sir?”

I stare back at him. “You know what’s about to happen, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“Right. And I’m not going to have a damn tube in my arm. Take it out.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” He gets to work, snapping on rubber gloves from his bag and gathering the other supplies. He starts talking to himself, like a kid trying to memorize the steps in an instruction manual—
close the clamp, stabilize catheter, pull dressing and tape toward the injection site, and…

“Ouch.”

“Sorry, sir…no sign of infection…here.” He places a gauze pad over the site. “Hold this down.”

A moment later, I’m taped up and ready to go. I go straight to my bedroom, into the small bathroom inside it. I pull out an electric razor and shave off most of the red beard, then use a razor and shaving cream to finish the job. Then I shower, taking the moment to enjoy the pressure of the steaming water on my face, awkward as it may be with my left arm hanging outside the shower, protecting the gauze pad and tape, doing everything with one hand. Still. I needed a shower. I needed a shave. I feel better, and appearances still matter, at least for one more day.

I put on the clean clothes that Carolyn’s husband gave me. I’m still wearing my jeans and shoes, but he gave me a button-down shirt that fits okay, plus clean boxers and socks. I’ve just finished combing my hair when I get a text message from
FBI Liz
telling me that we need to talk.

“Alex!” I call out. He pops into the bedroom. “Where the hell are they?”

“I understand they’re close, sir.”

“But everything’s okay? I mean, after what we went through last night…”

“My understanding, sir, is that they are secure and on their way.”

“Double-check that, Alex.”

I dial my FBI director’s number.

“Yes, Liz. What is it?”

“Mr. President, news on Los Angeles,”
she says.
“They weren’t targeting the defense contractor.”