The President Is Missing: A Novel (33 page)

A
lex Trimble shuts and locks the heavy door to the communications room. He removes a phone from his pocket and clicks it on.

Devin sits in the chair, laptop open, ready to go.

“Go, Devin,” I say. “Activate the virus.”

I look over Alex’s shoulder at his phone. The Secret Service installed cameras on the roof, and Alex and I watch the feed from the camera facing north—a white van barreling down the dirt path toward us.

“Where are you, Viper!” Alex cries into his radio.

As if responding to a stage director’s cue, a Marine helicopter, part of a new fleet of Viper attack helicopters, appears out of nowhere, swooping down as it closes on the van from behind. A Hellfire air-to-surface missile launches from its wing, spiraling toward the van.

The van explodes, a ball of orange flame, bouncing end over end before coming to rest on its side. Secret Service agents shuffle forward, automatic weapons poised—

The screen changes as Alex clicks a button: we are looking to the southeast, watching a firefight on the lake, agents on a boat and agents on the dock firing at another boat, trying desperately to keep it from reaching shore.

Alex, a finger pressed to the earbud in his ear, calls into his radio, “Navigator, clear a path! Clear a path! All agents stand clear for Viper!”

With that, the Secret Service boat reverses course, backing away from the attack boat, and the agents on the dock scramble back to ground and dive to the earth.

The Viper arrives, firing another Hellfire and completely incinerating the attack boat, a ball of flame along with a fountain of lake water. The Secret Service boat capsizes, too.

“Now drop me a perimeter of Marines!” Alex calls out into his radio, immediately moving to the next phase. The Marines, stationed at the local airport with the Viper, were his idea, letting us keep a low profile at the cabin, as I insisted, but keeping some heavy backup nearby.

“The agents in the water!” I say to Alex, pushing his shoulder.

He lowers his radio. “They have life preservers. They’re okay.” Back to his radio. “Where are my Marines? And I need a casualty report!”

“Okay, the virus is activated on the Pentagon server,” says Devin.

My head on a swivel, I focus on Devin as Alex moves to the door of the communications room and continues to shout instructions.

“Let’s see if this works.” Devin releases a breath. “Say a prayer.”

He types on the computer. We don’t have the smartscreen now, huddled as we are in the communications room, so I watch over his shoulder along with Casey and Augie as he pulls up the file properties, to see if the marked-as-deleted files will survive.

“That’s a zero,” I say, looking at the bottom row of the properties box. “A zero’s bad, right?”

“It’s…no…no,” says Devin. “It’s overwriting the files.”

“You deleted them?” I ask. “You marked them as del—”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Devin grabs the laptop in frustration. “Shit!”

I watch the same file properties, the boxes of descending rows of words and numbers, but seeing the zero in the bottom rows.

“Why isn’t it working?” I ask. “What’s—”

“We must not have completely reconstructed the virus in our tests,” says Augie. “The parts that we could not decrypt.”

“We missed something,” Casey says.

My blood goes cold. “The Pentagon server’s going to be erased?”

Casey raises a hand to her ear, her earpiece. “Repeat!” she says, closing her eyes in concentration. “Are you sure?”

“What, Casey?”

She turns to me. “Mr. President, our team at the Pentagon—they’re saying…the virus we just activated issued an ‘execute’ command throughout the system. The virus is detonating at Treasury…” She taps her ear. “Homeland Security. Transportation. Ev—everywhere, sir.” She looks at her smartphone. “My phone, too.”

I reach for my phone. “Where’s my phone?”

“Oh, no,” says Augie. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

“My phone, too,” says Devin. “It’s happening. Jesus, it’s going off everywhere! The virus is attacking everywhere.”

Casey falls to a crouch, gripping her hair.

“It’s happening,” she says. “God help us.”

For a moment I am stunned, in disbelief. Deep down, I always believed that somehow, in some way, it would never happen, that we’d figure something out.

God help us
is right.

Dark Ages has arrived.

T
he private jet lands on a narrow runway outside of Zagreb. Suliman Cindoruk stretches, gets up, and takes the stairs down onto the tarmac.

Two men greet him, each with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Tall, dark men with no expressions other than respectful acknowledgments to Suli. He follows them to a Jeep. They get in the front, and he gets in the back. Soon they are driving on a two-lane road parallel to the magnificent Mount Medvednica, so majestic in its—

He jumps at the sound of the ringtone on his phone. A ringtone he’s been expecting. The sound of a bomb exploding. The ringtone he reserved for just one event.

It’s early by a few hours. The Americans must have tried to delete it.

He pulls it up on his phone and reads the delicious words:
Virus activated
.

He closes his eyes and lets the warmth of satisfaction spread through him. There is nothing so sexy as a good, destructive overwrite, the power he can deploy from a keyboard thousands of miles away.

As the Jeep continues onward, the wind blowing his hair back, he savors the rush.
He
did this.

One man, who changed the course of history.

One man, who brought the world’s only superpower to its knees.

One man, who will soon be rich enough to enjoy it.

T
his can’t be right!”

“No, God, no—”

Panic, cursing, wailing all around me. My body trembling, still in a suspended state of disbelief, waiting to awaken from the nightmare, I move to the computer in the communications room, secured by a separate line that Dark Ages can’t touch.

We’ve moved to the threat-mitigation phase. I need to get hold of Carolyn.

First: get word to the congressional leaders—bring the House and Senate in, as soon as possible, to pass legislation authorizing the nationwide use of the military in our streets, the suspension of habeas corpus, wide-ranging executive authority to impose price controls and rationing.

Second: file the executive orders—

“Wait, what?” Devin cries out. “Wait, wait, wait! Casey, look at this.”

She rushes to his side. I do, too.

Devin works the computer, some kind of accelerated scrolling, jumping from one set of files to another. “It…I don’t get it…it…”

“It
what?
 ” I shout. “Speak!”

“It…” Devin types on the computer, various screens appearing and disappearing. “It started…it overwrote a few files, like it was trying to show us it could…but now it’s stopped.”

“It stopped? The virus
stopped?
 ”

Casey angles past me, peering at the computer screen. “What is
that?
 ” she asks.

B
ach stands in the window well as the gunfight rages on the lake. “Team 1, status,” she says, awaiting word from Lojzik, the Czech team leader.

“We are proceeding—what is—what—”

“Team 1, status!” she hisses, trying to keep her voice down.

“Helikoptéra!”
Lojzik cries in his native tongue.
“Odkud pochází helikoptéra?”

A helicopter?

“Team 1—”

She hears the explosion in stereo, coming from the north and from her earbuds via Lojzik’s transmitter. She looks to the north, the flames coloring the sky.

An attack helicopter? Something inside her sinks.

She tries the window into the laundry room. Locked.

“Jebi ga,”
she hisses, feeling a trickle of panic. She holds her sidearm by the suppressor, leans in toward the window—

“Ularning vertolyotlari bor!”
Hamid, the team 2 leader, shouts into her earbud. She doesn’t speak Uzbek, but she has a feeling—

“They have helicopter! They—”

The explosion is even louder this time, a massive eruption from the direction of the lake, pummeling her eardrum through the earbud as well, causing her a moment of imbalance.

It is unfamiliar, the fear blossoming inside her, raising her temperature, fluttering through her stomach. Not since Sarajevo has she truly felt afraid of anything or anyone. She hadn’t realized she was still capable of it.

She flicks the gun’s handle against the window, shattering the glass. She reaches in and unlocks the latch, waits for any reaction to the breaking glass from inside, her standard precaution. Five seconds. Ten seconds. No sound.

She pushes open the window and slides into the laundry room feetfirst.

W
hat?” I ask. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“It’s a…” Devin shakes his head. “Nina put a circuit breaker in.”

“A what?”

“A—she put a stopper in and installed a password override.”

“What the hell is going on, people?”

Augie touches my arm. “Apparently,” he says, his voice panicky, “Nina installed a mechanism that suspended the virus after it began to activate. As Devin said, it began to overwrite a small amount of data, to demonstrate its power to do so, but now it is suspended, giving us the opportunity to provide a password to stop it.”

“We didn’t replicate that when we reconstructed the virus,” says Casey. “We didn’t know it was there.”

“What about the viruses on the other computers and devices around the country?” I ask. “It’s talking to them, you said. Are they stopping, too?”

Casey speaks urgently into her headset. “Jared, we have a circuit breaker suspending the virus—are you getting that? You should be getting that…”

I stare at her, waiting.

Twenty seconds have never passed more slowly.

Her face lights up, her hand out like a stop sign. “Yes,” she says. “Yes! The virus on the Pentagon server must have sent out a ‘suspend’ command throughout the distributive system.”

“So…the virus is suspended everywhere?”

“Yes, sir. We have new life.”

“Let me see this password-override circuit-breaker thing.” I move Augie aside and look at the computer screen.

“The clock,” I note. “It’s counting down from, what, thirty minutes.”

“So the virus is in suspension for twenty-eight minutes and change?”

“Yes,” says Augie. “We have twenty-eight minutes remaining to enter the keyword. Or the virus activates in full. Across the entire system of devices.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I say, gripping my hair. “No, this is good, this is good, we’re still in the game. One last chance. Okay, a keyword.” I turn to Casey. “Don’t we have software that can decode passwords?”

“Well…yes, but not that we can install and operate in twenty-eight minutes, especially with
this
virus. It would take hours, more likely days or weeks—”

“Okay, then we have to guess. We have to guess.”

Simple,
Nina had said in her text message, when she said she could explain how to stop the virus. You don’t need to be an expert, she said.

Simple.
Simple if you know the keyword.

“What the hell is the keyword?” I turn to Augie. “She never mentioned anything?”

“I did not know of this at all,” he says. “I can only guess it was her way of protecting me, keeping our knowledge separate—”

“But maybe she said something to you. Like, in hindsight, she was giving you a clue? Think, Augie,
think
.”

“I…” Augie puts his hand on his forehead. “I…”

I try to think of anything Nina might have said to me in the Oval Office. She talked about the country burning, about being a package deal with Augie. She gave me a ticket to the Nationals game. The helicopter in Dubai…

It could be anything.

“Type ‘Suliman,’” I tell Devin.

He types in the word and hits Enter. The word disappears.

“Use all caps,” says Casey. “It might be case-sensitive.”

Devin does. Nothing.

“All lowercase.”

“Nope.”

“Type his whole name, Suliman Cindoruk,” I say.

Devin types it. No response.

“Jesus, how are we supposed to do this?” I say.

Simple,
Nina said in the text message.

I pat my pockets. I look around the room. “Where’s my phone? Where the hell’s my phone?”

“Try ‘Nina,’” says Augie.

“Nope. Not in all caps, either,” says Devin after trying both. “Not in all lowercase.”

“Try ‘Nina Shinkuba,’ all the different ways.”

“How do you spell Shinkuba?”

Everyone looks at Augie, who shrugs. “I never knew her last name until you told me,” he says to me.

I never saw it written. Liz gave me the information. I need to call her. I pat my pockets again, look around the room. “Where’s my phone?”

“Probably s-h-i-n-k-u-b-a,” says Casey.

Devin tries it a number of ways:

No luck. I look at the timer:

“Where the hell is my phone?” I say again. “Has anyone—”

Then I remember. I left my phone in the war room. I set it down while Devin was about to activate the virus. When Alex got word of the attack outside and hustled us into the communications room, I forgot it.

“I’ll be right back,” I say.

Alex, still on his radio, still monitoring things outside, sees my movement and rushes to block the door.

“No, sir! We’re in lockdown. We don’t have the all clear.”

“My phone, Alex. I need it—”

“No, sir, Mr. President.”

I grab his shirt, surprising him. “I’m giving you a direct order, Agent. That phone is more important than my life.”

“Then I’ll get it,” he says.

He reaches into his pocket.

“Then go, Alex! Go!”

“One moment, sir,” he says, removing something from his pocket.

“Keep trying!” I yell to my team. “Try Augie’s name! Augie Koslenko!”