Mauritania nodded, almost with satisfaction. “This Smith doesn’t want to become involved with the police, is suspicious of being followed, skilled at eluding a tail, is calm under attack, and can use a pistol well. I’d say our Dr. Smith is more than he seems, as we suspected.”
“At the very least, he’s got military training. But is Smith our main concern? What of the daughter? What of the five men, for there must’ve been a driver in the van? Weren’t you concerned about the daughter before this happened? Now people we don’t know, and who are experienced and well trained, have kidnapped her. It’s disturbing. What do they want? Who are they? What danger are they to us?”
Mauritania smiled. “Allah has answered your wish. They’re ours. I’m glad you approve of their skills. Obviously, it was wise of me to hire them.”
Abu Auda frowned. His gaze narrowed. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Does the mountain tell the wind everything? You had no need to know.”
“With time, even the mountain can be destroyed by the elements.”
“Calm yourself, Abu Auda. This was no reflection on you. We have a long and honorable history together, and now, at last, we’re in a position to show the world the truth of Islam. Who else would I want to share that with? But if you’d known about these men I hired, you would’ve only wanted to be with them. Not with me. I need you, as you well know.”
Abu Auda’s frown disappeared. “I suppose you’re right,” he said grudgingly.
“Good. Of course I am. Let’s return to the American, Jon Smith. If Captain Bonnard is correct, then Smith belongs to no known secret service. For whom, precisely, does he work?”
“Could our new allies have sent him? Some plan of their own they haven’t bothered to tell us? I don’t trust them.”
“You don’t trust your dog, your wives, or your grandmother.” Mauritania gave a small smile and contemplated his music. He closed his eyes a moment as the raga rhythm subtly altered. “But you’re right to be careful. Treachery is always possible, often inevitable. Not only a wily desert Fulani can be devious.”
“There’s another thing,” Abu Auda went on as if he had not heard. “The man I assigned to watch the Pasteur Institute says he can’t be certain, but he thinks there was someone else watching not only Smith but him. A woman. Dark-haired, young, but unattractive and poorly-dressed.”
Mauritania’s blue eyes snapped open. “Watching both Smith and our man? He has no idea who she was?”
“None.”
Mauritania uncoiled and stood up. “It’s time to leave Paris.”
Abu Auda was surprised. “I don’t like going away without knowing more about Smith and this unknown female who watches us.”
“We expected attention, didn’t we? We’ll observe and be careful, but we must also move. Relocation is the best defense.”
Abu Auda smiled, displaying a dazzling set of white teeth against his black skin. “You sound like a desert warrior yourself. Perhaps you learn after all these years.”
“A compliment, Abu?” Mauritania laughed. “An honor indeed. Don’t worry about Smith. We know enough, and if he’s actually searching for us, we’ll deal with him on our terms. Report to our friends that Paris has become too crowded, and we’re moving early. It may be necessary to adjust our timetable forward. Beginning now.”
The giant warrior nodded as he followed the small terrorist, who glided from the room, his feet seeming barely to touch the carpet, soundless.
Folsom, California
The attack began at six p.m. in the headquarters of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) in the small prison town of Folsom, east of Sacramento. Cal-ISO was an essential component of the state’s power system and integral to the movement of electricity throughout California. Although it was May, Californians were already worrying that summer might bring the return of rolling blackouts.
One of the operators, Tom Milowicz, stared at the dials of the big grid. “Jesus Christ,” he breathed.
“The numbers are spinning south. Into the toilet!”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s too much, too fast. The grid’s going to crash! Get Harry!’
Arlington, Virginia
In a secret installation across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, the elite computer specialists of the FBI cyber team quickly determined the catastrophe to be the work of a hacker, country of origin still undetermined. Now they battled to bring the California power grid back online and stop the hacker’s progress. But as the team discovered, it was already too late.
The hacker had written”compiled”software that allowed him or her to shatter the tough firewalls that usually protected the most sensitive parts of the Cal-ISO power system. He had bypassed trip wires, which were intended to alert security personnel to unauthorized entry, had bypassed logs that pinpointed intruders while they were committing an illegal infiltration, and had opened closed ports.
Then the extraordinarily adept hacker had moved on, invading one power supplier after another, because Cal-ISO’s computers were linked to a system that controlled the flow of electricity across the entire state. In turn, the California system was tied into the transmission grid for the whole Western United States. The invader hacked from system to system with phenomenal speed. Unbelievable, to anyone who did not witness it.
Lights, stoves, air conditioners, heaters, cash registers, computers, ATMs, breathing devicesall machines, from luxury to life-giving, as long as they required electricitywent dead as power to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Denver suddenly ceased.
Outside Reno, Nevada
The battered old Chrysler Imperial of Ricky Hitomi rocked with the shrieks and laughter of his five best friends as it powered down the rural blacktop through the night. They had met at his girlfriend Janis Borotra’s house and smoked a few joints in the barn before all piling into Ricky’s heap. Now they were heading for more fun at Justin Barley’s place. They were high-school seniors and would graduate in a week.
Occupied with their wild partying, their minds dulled with weed, none saw or heard the fast-moving freight train in the distance. Nor did they notice that the gate at the crossing was still up, the warning lights dark, and the alarm bells silent. When Janis finally heard the screaming train whistle and shrieking brakes, she shouted at Ricky. It was too late. Ricky was already driving onto the rail crossing.
The freight train blasted into them and carried the car and their battered bodies a mile before it could stop.
Arlington, Virginia
Panic spread in the secret FBI cyber installation across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital. A decade ago, the nation’s telephones, power grids, and emergency 911 number and fire dispatches had been separate systems, individual, unique. They could be hacked, but only with great difficulty, and certainly the hacker could not get from one system to another, except under very unusual circumstances.
But deregulation had changed all that. Today hundreds of new energy firms existed, as well as online power traders, and everything was linked through the multitude of telephone companies, whose interconnections also had resulted from deregulation. This vast number of electronically joined entities looked a lot like the Internet, which meant the best hackers could use one system as a door to another.
Defeated by the power and speed of the hacker, the FBI experts watched helplessly as switches flipped and the violent mischief continued. The velocity at which firewalls were breached and codes blown shocked them. But the worst aspect of the nightmare was how quickly the hacker could adjust his access code.
In fact, it seemed almost as if their counterattack caused his code to evolve. The more they fought him and his computer, the smarter his computer became. They had never seen anything like it. It was impossiblehellip;horrifying. A machine that could learn and evolve far faster than a human thought.
Denver, Colorado
In her penthouse atop the opulent twenty-story Aspen Towers apartment building, Carolyn Helms, founder and CEO of Saddle Leather Cosmetics for Western Men, was entertaining her business associates at an intimate birthday dinnerher forty-second. It was a joyous occasion. She had made them a lot of money, and they were a great team, anticipating an even more exciting and lucrative future.
Just as her longtime close friend and executive vice president George Harvey toasted her for the third time, she gasped, clutched her heart, and collapsed. George fell to his knees to check her vital signs. Her treasurer, Hetty Sykes, called 911. George began CPR.
The paramedic rescue team of the Denver Fire Department arrived within four minutes. But as they rushed into the building, the lights went off and the elevators froze. The building was in complete darkness. In fact, from what they could tell, the whole city was. They searched for the stairs. As soon as they found them, they began the long run up twenty stories to the penthouse.
By the time they arrived, Carolyn Helms was dead.
Arlington, Virginia