Lethal Code Read online

  BY THOMAS WAITE

  Lethal Code

  Terminal Value

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Thomas Waite

  All rights reserved.

  “For You” by Bruce Springsteen.

  Copyright © 1972 Bruce Springsteen, renewed © 2000 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477825051

  ISBN-10: 1477825053

  Cover design by Scott Barrie

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936918

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IN 2012, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR AND DEFENSE SECRETARY LEON PANETTA GAVE A STARTLING SPEECH ABOUT U.S. VULNERABILITY TO CYBER WARFARE:

  “The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be a cyber Pearl Harbor; an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life. In fact, it would paralyze and shock the nation and create a new, profound sense of vulnerability . . .

  “Before September 11, 2001, the warning signs were there. We weren’t organized. We weren’t ready and we suffered terribly for that lack of attention. We cannot let that happen again. This is a pre-9/11 moment.”

  To the men and women who work tirelessly in anonymity defending the citizens of the U.S. against cyber attacks every day.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While Lethal Code is a work of fiction, most of the technologies, cyber attack vulnerabilities, and cyber war scenarios contained in this novel are based on facts. As much as I would like readers to find this novel to be a gripping, entertaining thriller, I also hope it will illuminate the very real dangers our nation now faces.

  CHAPTER 1

  LANA ELKINS WATCHED HER daughter, Emma, sweep into the kitchen so quickly that she was immediately suspicious. More so when her fourteen-year-old positioned herself behind the cooking island, which could hide whatever skimpy outfit she’d just put on for school.

  Lana waved her to the side. “Come on, let me see.”

  Emma’s dark eyes flared as she moved begrudgingly into view.

  “That’s just over the top,” Lana said, shaking her head at the gauzy mauve miniskirt. “You can’t possibly sit and be decent in that.”

  “Yes, I can,” Emma insisted, helping herself to a frozen waffle that Lana had toasted for her.

  With her long black hair, fair skin, and freckles sprinkled delightfully across her nose, Emma bore a sharp likeness to her attractive mother. But the girl’s getup worried Lana, who knew that some boys would stop at little if they thought they’d been lured.

  The daily battle over Emma’s outfits was getting tiresome. Lana had often wished a wholesome adult male were around to share the responsibility of child rearing, especially with Emma starting to experiment with alcohol. But the man who’d fathered Emma was neither wholesome nor present, having fled for good as Emma entered toddlerhood, which might have been for the—

  Lana’s thoughts were silenced by the lights turning dark in the kitchen. So did the matching sconces in the hallway a few feet away. A sunny September morning, but all the bulbs turned cold in a blink.

  She looked around, listening to the refrigerator shut down. It sounded like a strangely human groan. The whole house seemed to settle at once, as if the power had drained not only from lamps and stove and radio but also from the concrete foundation itself.

  She glanced at her watch: 7:40. In five minutes she was planning to drive Emma to school in suburban D.C.

  “What’s happening?” asked Emma as she stared at the blank readout on the espresso machine, a forkful of waffle frozen in the air.

  “I’m not sure.” Lana stepped to the bay window in the living room. Her neighbor, a pale-haired gent in his seventies, was peering up and down the street while wearing an aqua blue bathrobe, as if to spy a light in someone else’s house. The weather looked clear, headed for another hot day, but Lana recalled no warnings about thunderstorms. “Could be a blackout from all the air conditioners,” she thought aloud.

  Pulling out her smartphone, she tapped a quick text to ask a few of her cybersecurity firm colleagues if the outage was affecting them. Strangely, her phone wouldn’t transmit, despite being fully charged. With a sigh, she called up the browser to check the Web for news.

  No service? Lana knew their phones should work. At the very least, she should be able to get online.

  Emma, a famously fast texter, worked her own phone, and then looked across the living room with a “fix it” plea in her eyes.

  “Everything’s shut down,” said Lana as she tried—and failed—to resend her text.

  “What’s happened?” Emma demanded.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Lana pulled out her satphone, which connected directly to communication satellites, bypassing any earthbound blackout. That phone had service, so she feverishly tried other Internet service providers in the farther reaches of the country. None was available.

  Emma drifted close to her side as distant sirens came alive in a chilling chorus. No blackout had ever shut off power to the whole country or knocked out ground-based communications so thoroughly. Those two startling facts kindled Lana’s deepest fear: that a massive cyberattack had targeted the nation’s grid, a conclusion based on all she had learned during her decade as a cyberspy at the National Security Agency—and in the years since she’d started her own security firm, CyberFortress. As far as the power and communications were concerned, the U.S. had just turned into one big blank. And if that were true, the next stage, which could come quickly, might be bedlam.

  She grabbed her bag and fished out her key fob. “I don’t think there’s going to be school today. I need you to stay home until I find out for sure what’s going on. Do not go out or open any windows. You’ll just let the hot air in.”

  In any potential disaster, Lana knew you wanted to keep the house as airtight as possible for reasons far more frightening than hot air, but she spared Emma those fears.

  “I don’t want to stay home,” Emma complained. “If there’s no school, I’m hanging out with my friends.”

  “Listen to me, please.” Lana stepped closer to her daughter. “First of all, there may be school. Just let me find out. But if there isn’t, there could be problems today. Things should be fine, but if the power is off all around the area, people might start doing stupid things.”

  “What stupid things?” Worry softened Emma
’s voice, bringing out the child in the adolescent.

  “I don’t know,” Lana said. “Hopefully nobody will do anything stupid. But I don’t want you wandering the streets if this turns into an emergency. So stay inside and keep the doors locked. I’ll come back and get you if this is just a local problem.”

  Fat chance, Lana added, but only to herself: Those sirens were growing louder.

  She hurried into the garage, lifted the heavy door by hand, then headed directly for CyberFortress in her Prius. Her company had ample emergency power; hopefully, she’d get some answers there.

  A lot of other people must have decided to seek greener pastures as well, because traffic was even heavier than usual.

  Lana inched toward a railroad overpass, stunned when she failed to find a single radio station after scanning the dial. All she heard were those sirens. The radio’s silence was yet another bad sign.

  A shadow fell over her, and she realized she was under the trestle.

  More stop-and-go eased her back into the bright sunlight. She found herself drumming the steering wheel.

  Still moving slowly, she came to a stop on a slight rise about two hundred feet beyond the crossing. Seconds later, a horrendous screech of train brakes turned her attention to her rearview mirror. An Amtrak Acela Express was heading straight toward a Norfolk Southern locomotive with a long line of freight cars, including fuel and ammonia tankers.

  Lana strangled the steering wheel when the two trains collided thunderously. The Amtrak slid toward the railing. The steel bent like licorice. Astounded, Lana watched the engine car tumble slowly over the edge of the concrete overpass. Passenger cars twisted off the rails one by one, flattening automobiles and SUVs across all four lanes.

  She could no longer avoid acknowledging her worst suspicions, because they had just become tragically clear: The grid’s down. After all our warnings.

  Much of the work she did every day—often involving developing counterespionage measures against Chinese hackers—was meant to avert this very crisis: not just losing the grid, but all the devastation its loss would entail. It was unfolding before her very eyes.

  The crushed nose of the Norfolk Southern locomotive pointed toward the ongoing tragedy, as if it were content to merely peer into the abyss. But not for long: The engine car broke through the demolished railing and also began to fall.

  Lana saw a mother with an infant race out from under the engine car’s shadow. But a man tangled in a seat belt made it only halfway out of his big pickup before he was crushed to death.

  Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.

  Cars on both trains slammed down from the elevated tracks in a perversely syncopated series of terrifying crashes.

  Lana heard a lone scream, horrific and piercing—followed quickly by scores of others.

  Then the explosions began.

  CHAPTER 2

  A TANKER CAR, FILLED with ethanol, blew up with such force that shock waves shook the Prius as if it were made of lint. As the flash widened—engulfing the vehicles closest to the tracks—Lana looked ahead, frantic to get moving. But nothing in front of her budged. She turned back and saw boiling flames, several hundred feet away, heading toward her and gobbling up cars. Then she witnessed a series of violent explosions as their fuel tanks blew up, adding to the pandemonium.

  She opened the door to run when two things happened at once: The outside air hit her like a huge broiler oven, forcing her back inside, and the blue Yukon in front of her started to speed away.

  She drove as close to the big SUV as she dared, wishing she could see past its high profile but grateful to be moving at all—and acutely aware of the explosions that were chasing her.

  Another quick glance in her rearview showed that fireballs were now reaching where she had been idling only moments ago—and they were still mushrooming outward.

  “Don’t stop!” she screamed when the Yukon’s brake lights came on, but the driver must have been tail gating as closely as possible, just like Lana, because the red lights blinked off a half second later.

  Too fearful to look back, she continued to ride that bumper as tightly as she could, feeling the temperature in the car rise. Sweat dripped down her brow and burned her eyes, and she smelled smoke. But when she did look back, she saw that she’d widened the gap between herself and the burgeoning hell storm.

  In Lana’s side-view mirror, flames shot from the tops of mature cherry trees that had turned into tinder during the long hot summer. Cinders rose into the air, fiery seeds spreading the conflagration to a nearby park.

  Up ahead, she spotted the first intersection after the overpass. She had driven through it countless times, but this morning it looked scary and surreal. The stoplight was dark, but somehow traffic just kept moving forward, which seemed like a miracle: that drivers—no doubt panicky themselves—were letting the cars in the most immediate danger pass through the intersection.

  But it wasn’t a miracle. It was heroism. Young adults in satiny blue robes had linked arms and stationed themselves in front of the cross traffic on both sides of the four-way to keep the passage open for those escaping the disaster. A bus, the same bright blue color as the robes, had pulled up on a curb, CAPITOL BAPTIST CHURCH CHOIR painted on its side.

  Lana filled with gratitude, not just for herself, but for the people in even greater peril behind her. Those kids out there were lifesavers of the first order.

  She also spotted dozens of people running toward the flames and ongoing explosions, some carrying first aid kits, others bottled water; many bore nothing more than their considerable courage.

  Lana wanted to join them, but not with cars still behind her trying to flee the deadly train wreck.

  After driving about a mile she spied a place to pull over. She rushed to her trunk and pulled out her running gear, which she typically kept stored away till lunchtime. In less than two minutes she changed into her cross-trainers, running shorts, and a sleeveless top, leaving her heels, hose, and blouse strewn on the passenger seat.

  She raced off to see what she could do. She had no special training, though she might be able to administer CPR, having taken two classes when Emma was an infant. Mostly, she was able-bodied and thought she could, at the very least, help the injured away from the smoke and flames.

  But the open intersection where the young choir members had saved the lives of so many motorists had turned into gridlock. A couple of hundred yards beyond it, the fire still burned the cars and bodies trapped in the hungriest flames. The park near the tall cherry trees was also fully aflame; dark plumes rose from the plastic playground gear and soccer field stands.

  A whole new set of sirens rent the air, but she could not see fire trucks, ambulances, or police cars; access had been cut off by the chockablock cars, most of them now abandoned. People were running off, arms full of belongings.

  The sirens grew so loud that Lana might not have noticed a young woman’s cries for help if the teen hadn’t been waving her arms frantically; the satiny blue fabric caught Lana’s eye. A choir member, she realized. The girl looked just two or three years older than Emma. She was clearly distraught, huddling over a supine figure.

  Lana hurried to her, finding the young woman cradling the head of a man wearing an identical robe. He was bleeding from his leg and hands. But his eyes were open, and he was conscious enough to notice her.

  Crouching, Lana asked the girl how badly he was hurt.

  “Real bad,” she said. “I’ve got to get him out of here, but I need help getting him up.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t. What happened to him?”

  “We had to stop those cars,” the girl said, “but some of them wouldn’t, so we made them stop by forming a chain, but they kept bumping us, and then one of them hit Shawn pretty hard and then just ran him over and took off. Then a bunch of other cars started coming through. I barely got him out of the way. They would have killed him,” she added in disbelief.

  Lana looked around. No help anywhere. “All r
ight, let’s move him, if you think he can walk. I’ve got a car.”

  “Shawn.” The girl leaned close to him. “We’re going to try to get you out of here.”

  Smoke swept over them. He looked around, clearly worried. So was Lana. The fire was creeping closer.

  “What’s your name?” Lana asked the young woman.

  “Tanesa.”

  “Okay, Tanesa, you take one arm and I’ll take the other. And let’s be careful of his hands.”

  Shawn was lean, thankfully, but Lana and Tanesa still struggled to help him up. Once standing, though, he was able to put all his weight on his left foot. That’s when Lana noticed that he was missing his right shoe and that his anklebone was sticking out of that foot.

  “How close is your car?” Shawn asked in a shaky voice.

  “Not far.” Not true, but Lana wanted to give him hope.

  She kept lying as he hopped along between them, an arm over each of their shoulders. Smoke billowed past them every few seconds. All of them coughed, Shawn most painfully of all; every movement made him grimace.

  But Lana peppered him with lots of question, doing all she could to keep him from falling into shock. She learned that their prize-winning choir had just returned from a tour of rural churches in the Carolinas. He was an alto, Tanesa a soprano. Lana was already thinking of nominating them for community service awards, holding a fund-raiser—doing something to recognize their extraordinary courage.

  After what seemed an interminable hike, the car appeared. But it was agony for the young man to get his right leg in the Prius. He pleaded with her to let him leave it out while she drove. That was inviting the foot’s complete ruin, but all Lana had to do was shake her head and, with a mighty howl, he used both hands to yank his leg into the car. More than his ankle had been broken, she saw now. It looked like the bones in his lower leg had also been snapped.

  Lana rushed him to the nearest trauma center, Bethesda’s Suburban Hospital. Cars were already backing up.