The President Is Missing(94)

The phone call with the Senate majority leader goes much the same way as he and his leadership team are moved to underground bunkers.

Lester Rhodes, instinctively suspicious of me after I lay out as much as I can for him, says, “Mr. President, what kind of a threat are we looking at?”

“I can’t give you that right now, Lester. I just need you and your leadership team secured. As soon as I can tell you, I will.”

I hang up before he can ask me what this means for next week’s select committee hearing, which assuredly was on his mind. He probably thinks I’m trying to throw up some diversion to distract the country from what he’s trying to do to me. A guy like Lester, it’s the first place his mind would travel. Here we are, treating this like a DEFCON 1 scenario, including taking action to secure the continuity of our government, and he’s still treating it like cheap politics.

Inside the communications room, I click on the laptop and summon Carolyn Brock.

“Mr. President,” she says, “they’re all secure in the operations center.”

“Brendan Mohan?” I say, referring to my national security adviser.

“He’s secure, yes.”

“Rod Sanchez?” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“He’s secure,” Carolyn says.

“Dom Dayton?” The secretary of defense.

“Secure.”

“Erica Beatty?”

“Secure, sir.”

“Sam Haber?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the vice president.”

My circle of six.

Carolyn says, “They’re all secure in the operations center.”

Keep your head and find a way.

“Have them ready to speak with me in a few minutes,” I say.





Chapter

88



I return to the war room, where the computer techs are still giving it every effort they can muster. With their relatively young faces, their tired, bloodshot eyes, and the urgency of their actions, they look as much like students cramming for finals as they do cybersecurity experts trying to save the world.

“Stop,” I say. “Everyone stop.”

The room goes quiet. All eyes on me.

“Is it possible,” I say, “that you people are too damn smart?”

“Too smart, sir?”

“Yes. Is it possible that you have so much knowledge, and you’re up against something so sophisticated, that you haven’t considered a simple solution? That you can’t see the forest for the trees?”

Casey looks around the room, throws up a hand. “At this point, I’m open to—”

“Show me,” I say. “I want to see this thing.”

“The virus?”

“Yes, Casey, the virus. The one that’s going to destroy our country, if you weren’t sure which virus I meant.”

Everyone’s on edge, frazzled, an air of desperation in the room.

“Sorry, sir.” She drops her head and goes to work on a laptop. “I’ll use the smartscreen,” she says, and for the first time I notice that the whiteboard is really some kind of computer smartboard.

I look over at the smartscreen. A long menu of files suddenly appears. Casey scrolls down until she clicks on one.

“Here it is,” she says. “Your virus.”

I look at it, doing a double take:

Suliman.exe



“How humble of him,” I say. He named the virus after himself. “This is the file we couldn’t find for two weeks?”

“Sir, it avoided detection,” says Casey. “Nina programmed it so it bypassed logging and—well, so it basically disappeared whenever we looked for it.”

I shake my head. “So can you open this thing? Does it open?”

“Yes, sir. It took us a while to do even that.” She types on her laptop, and the contents of the virus pop up on the smartscreen.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a little green gargoyle, ready to gobble up data and files like some demented Pac-Man.

It’s just a bunch of scrambled jumble. Six lines of symbols and letters—ampersands and pound signs, capital and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation marks—that bear no resemblance to a written word in any language.

“Is this some kind of encrypted code we’re supposed to unravel?”

“No,” says Augie. “It is obfuscated. Nina obfuscated the malicious code so it cannot be read, it cannot be reverse-engineered. The whole point is to make it unreadable.”

“But you re-created it, didn’t you?”

“We did, to a large extent,” says Augie. “You’ve got great people in this room, but we can’t be sure we re-created everything. And we know we did not re-create the timing mechanism.”

I exhale, putting my hands on my hips, dropping my head.

“Okay, so you can’t disable it. Kill it. Whatever.”

Casey says, “That’s correct. When we try to disable or remove the virus, it activates.”

“Explain ‘activates’ to me. You mean it deletes all the data?”

“It overwrites all active files,” she says. “They can’t be reconstructed.”

“So it’s like deleting a file and then deleting it again from the trash, like when I had my Macintosh in the nineties?”