The President Is Missing(106)

“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.





Chapter

104



Bach 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.





Chapter

105



What?” 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.

Enter Keyword: _________________ 28:47



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

28:41…28:33…28:28…



“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.”