The President Is Missing(105)

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.





Chapter

102



The 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.





Chapter

103



This can’t be right!”