Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

  Lethal Code

  “Taut, tense, and provocative, this frighteningly knowing cyberthriller will keep you turning pages—not only to devour the fast-paced fiction, but to worry about how much is terrifyingly true.”

  —Hank Phillippi Ryan, author of Truth Be Told, and winner of the Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards

  “Lethal Code is not just an outstanding, harrowing thriller about a massive cyberattack against the United States, it is based on the very real cyber threats we face today and should serve as a wake-up call to all Americans. As the president and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, I can tell you that Waite has done his homework.”

  —Corey Thomas, President and CEO of Rapid7

  “Lethal Code is a compelling and well-researched thriller about a major cyberattack against America. Waite’s characters bring to life the very real cyber vulnerabilities we face every day and demonstrate that America’s cyber insecurity is a serious national security issue.”

  —Melissa Hathaway, President of Hathaway Global Strategies, and former cyber advisor to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama

  “No matter what you do or where you live, a massive cyberattack against the United States will impact your life. That’s what Waite demonstrates so convincingly in Lethal Code. He shows us the effect a hit to the country’s solar plexus would have with a tale that will leave you gasping for days, whether you’re a business person or a private citizen concerned about our nation’s defense vulnerabilities.”

  —David DeWalt, Chairman and CEO of network security firm FireEye

  Terminal Value

  “I believe with time he will be called the John Grisham of the murderous technology novels. This is an excellent beginning to, what I hope is, a long writing career for Mr. Waite.”

  —Literary R & R

  “Thomas Waite opens a window into the world of technology that even a technophobe can appreciate. Filled with tension, romance, humor, mystery, and avarice, Terminal Value is a captivating tale that holds your interest right through to its surprising conclusion.”

  —David Updike, author of Old Girlfriends: Stories and Out on the Marsh

  “Terminal Value is to the corporate world what John Grisham’s The Firm is to lawyering: a taut, fast, relentless thriller. A most impressive debut novel.”

  —Jim Champy, co-author of Reengineering the Corporation and author of Outsmart!

  “Terminal Value is a sizzling thriller convincingly set in the world of emerging technologies that even industry insiders will appreciate. Thomas Waite has earned the right to belly up to the bar with the likes of Brad Meltzer, Scott Turow, and David Baldacci. A great read!”

  —Paul Carroll, author and Pulitzer Prize–nominated Wall Street Journal editor and journalist

  Lana Elkins Thrillers

  Lethal Code

  Trident 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 © 2015 Thomas Waite

  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: 9781477828403

  ISBN-10: 1477828400

  Cover design by Stewart Williams

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957278

  To the men and women whose unstinting efforts to defend citizens against potentially devastating cyberattacks should be applauded every day.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  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

  PART II

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IN 2014, THE PENTAGON RELEASED A REPORT ASSERTING DECISIVELY THAT CLIMATE CHANGE POSES AN IMMEDIATE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY, WITH INCREASED RISKS FROM TERRORISM, INFECTIOUS DISEASE, GLOBAL POVERTY, AND FOOD SHORTAGES.

  Former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel: “Defense leaders must be part of this global discussion. We must be clear-eyed about the security threats presented by climate change, and we must be proactive in addressing them.”

  We ignore this report—and the former defense secretary’s warning—at our peril.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Since the writing of Lethal Code, the world has witnessed an ever-increasing number of cyberattacks aimed at governments, corporations, and individuals. While the books in my Lana Elkins series are works of fiction, most of the cyberattack vulnerabilities and cyberwar scenarios are based on facts.

  PROLOGUE

  DR. BRIAN AHEARN PULLED into his four-door garage, taking the spacious slot reserved for his Beemer between his wife’s silver Mercedes SUV and his summer car, a yellow Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet. The perks, he reminded himself, of a job well done.

  He cut his headlights and moved to click the big door shut, but stopped to look in his rearview mirror at the sunset’s startling rose tint, the color of blood on a microscope slide. Years ago, in his undergraduate days at Brown, Brian had looked at many of those red splotches before deciding that pre-med wasn’t for him.

  And a fine move that had proved to be. He’d switched to computer engineering and found a job with a lot more challenge—and considerably less gore.

  Until today.

  But what did the chisel-chinned, sandy-haired Harvard professor know of grisliness as he watched the door roll down behind him? Nothing, in short.

  At that very instant his ears began to ring. He paid no mind till it occurred to him—a very odd thought, he realized at once—that it might be the body’s own alarm system. A feral instinct trying to protect him, like the hairs on one’s neck coming alive under the insistent gaze of a stranger.

  He was too much of a scientist to believe in a sixth sense, but too much of a husband and father to ignore it. He had to go into his house. Marla would be there. So would his four-year-old twin girls, the little loves of his life. It was pizza night, his daughters’ favorite. His, too, he pretended.

  Right then he told himself to pretend that he was not afraid.

  Open the damn door.

  As he entered his access code into the garage’s security panel, he caught the comforting scent of roasting mozzarella and pizza dough.

  “Hello, I’m home,” he called.

  He hu
ng up his coat, listening intently. He heard nothing, just the strange ringing in his ears. But four-year-olds are not silent. It’s not in their nature. Certainly not Eva or Erica, unless they were sleeping. And they wouldn’t be napping at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon. If they weren’t racing around, they would be watching the sixty-inch screen, or playing computer games, or imploring their mother to read to them. Something. Not this . . . absence.

  The first cold drip of perspiration streaked down his spine. It was the only one he would notice.

  “Marla,” he called out. “Eva, Erica?”

  He rushed into their spacious kitchen, finding immediate relief in the custom pizza oven at work, offering its glassy view of the treat within.

  Brian took a breath, freed now of his irrational fear, finding normalcy in pizza night proceeding apace. He hadn’t been that spooked since he was old enough to stop checking for a bogeyman under his bed.

  Marla must have been giving them a bath. He looked at his watch again. Of course she is.

  And on any other evening, she would have been.

  He cracked the oven, sniffing the cheese and tomato sauce, oregano and basil, green peppers and mushrooms, and for the first few seconds the scents pleased him, making him feel as warm as the crust gently browning before his eyes.

  Truth be told, Brian would have liked it even better if there were pepperoni on his pizza, even the vegan variety, although the latter would have been at odds with everything Marla had held dear about the family’s diet. She had always been firmly opposed to “priming” the girls for meat eating by offering them soy in any of its carnivorous impersonations.

  He had to sneak his meat. He and a professor in MIT’s math department scooted off together for “Hamburger Wednesdays” at Tasty Burger in Harvard Square. Both their spouses would have considered their clandestine affairs with hamburgers to be culinary slumming. His midweek lunch was only one of many secrets Brian kept from Marla. He kept even more from his colleagues.

  He turned from the oven and saw the chopping block wiped clean, just the way the fastidious Marla always left it . . . except for the cleaver with its thick dark handle. It lay a foot away with fresh red smears—worse, far worse, than anything he’d ever seen on a slide. Then he noticed the spatters on the counter and cabinets, so vivid he could not help imagining the red spray, as if the cleaver were at work right now. And there was Marla’s engagement diamond, in its exquisite setting, gleaming on the tile counter. Her gold band stood on its side inches away, as if awaiting her finger to slip inside.

  Finger?

  “Oh, no,” he murmured, for his eyes were roaming past the chopping block to the tile where Marla’s ring finger lay in a pool of blood.

  His Adam’s apple moved. Only then did he realize he was fighting an eruption of bile. His hand slipped a Wüsthof chef knife from its polished wooden perch on the counter.

  He wanted to back away, retreat through the door he’d just entered and run down the street. But he couldn’t: Marla, Eva, Erica.

  Shamed by his own fright, Brian had to force himself to take the first step; already he felt sentenced to death.

  Before reaching the living room, he spotted a tall bulky man in black overalls and a black ski mask standing on the inside of the wide passageway, and realized that he must have been watching him the entire time. Startled, Brian raised the knife.

  The man shook his head patiently. Didn’t even point his black pistol at him. Didn’t need to. Brian simply dropped the blade. He was no match. He knew it even then. The point stuck in the floor and the handle shuddered, as if a sudden chill had swept through the house.

  “Keep coming,” the gunman said.

  Two more men, also masked and fully attired in black, sat forward on a long cinnamon-colored couch as Brian made his way past original oils by renowned contemporaries and over handloomed carpets that he and Marla had purchased on vacations in the Middle East and Asia.

  He found his wife sitting between the pair of masked men. Her mouth was duct-taped, eyes wet and red. So was one of her bloody, gauze-covered hands. Brian realized she was in shock, pained beyond any bounds she had ever known.

  He tried to rush to her side. The behemoth with the gun—trailing silently behind him—grabbed Brian’s arm. His strength was enormous.

  “The girls?” Brian asked, terrified. He realized he was begging. The fear he’d known in the garage had returned—with good reason. “Where are they?”

  No one answered. Not with words. Not yet.

  The shorter of the two men on the couch rose, telling Brian to sit next to his wife. “Hold her hand.” It sounded like he was smiling. Brian couldn’t tell through the ski mask.

  He walked over to Marla, who did not raise her eyes to him. Her long hair had fallen forward, crowding her fine features, blocking most of her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Red streaks tinged the left side of her handsome blonde cut, as though she’d tried to push it out of her face and failed.

  She fell against him, sobbing behind the gag of gray tape.

  “Are the girls all right?” Brian asked the short man, who appeared to be in charge. Despite his height, he looked strong: thick in the legs, torso, and neck, like a hard-core bodybuilder.

  “They’re fine,” he told him. “Tied up at the moment.”

  “Promise?” Brian asked from what he recognized was a position of complete weakness. But he was wrong.

  “They are right now, but they won’t be if you don’t cooperate with us.”

  Brian didn’t need to ask. He knew they wanted his work on Ambient Air Capture, AAC, the Holy Grail of geoengineering, which used technology to fight climate change. AAC extracted carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. But unlike previous AAC efforts—puny in their impact—Brian’s prototype, built in his home lab, removed massive amounts of CO2 efficiently.

  But he’d had to go rogue to do it. The American Oil Producers Association, AOPA, had insisted that he work for them in secret. The race to perfect AAC was so fierce among so many scientists and engineers that they’d wanted only a tight handful of men at the very top tier of their association to know where they’d placed most of their research money.

  AOPA, along with the rest of the fossil-fuel industry, stood to make trillions from Brian’s work, for it would permit carbon fuels to be burned forever—and the industry’s massive profits to continue—because the heat-absorbing CO2 molecules spinning wildly into the atmosphere could be reclaimed by Brian’s invention, along with the carbon dioxide that had been up there several hundreds of thousands of years.

  In malevolent hands, AAC could create an ice age or turn the earth into an oven. More responsible parties could use AAC to reduce global temperatures to what they had been at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when massive amounts of carbon started getting pumped out of smokestacks. Regardless, whatever CO2 was removed could be turned into carbon monoxide, CO, and combined with hydrogen to produce hydrocarbons, including gas and jet fuels.

  Work on AAC had begun in earnest with the development of artificial trees that could be placed anywhere; they did not have to be at the end of a factory exhaust pipe for Direct Air Capture, DAC. In fact, with the lower concentration of carbon dioxide in cleaner air, the “trees” were not overburdened with all the other noxious gases coming from factories or power plants. That made their most important task—capturing CO2—easier. AAC also addressed the nettlesome challenge of collecting carbon dioxide from widely dispersed sources, most notably from the transportation industry.

  Dr. Ahearn’s great achievement was to invent highly engineered catalysts that turned CO2 into carbon monoxide at much faster rates than ever before, and much more cheaply. Because CO and hydrogen formed the chief components of petroleum and natural gas, Dr. Ahearn was making possible the recycling of CO2 into the very fuels that produced the greenhouse gas in the first place.

  From
the waste that now threatened to toast the planet would come wonder. AAC in Brian’s hands would become a perpetual money machine for the fossil-fuel industry. And that would make him a billionaire many times over.

  So Brian had agreed to AOPA’s insistence on secrecy, even coming to behave as if the idea had been his all along, lording it over them by saying that capturing carbon dioxide from the air was strictly his until he said he was ready. He’d felt like Superman. But now it seemed that the oil producers were exerting their power in the cruelest way imaginable.

  Brian was so wrong, so simplistic in his understanding of what was actually happening right before his eyes.

  “We’ve stolen your hard drive,” the short muscular man said. “Now we want your external hard drive.” He pointed to a framed bright-green finger painting by Eva, the firstborn twin. It hung on a wall less than ten feet away. “Take that down and open the safe behind it. You were no better at protecting your files than you were at protecting your family. If you want your little girls to live, you’ll open that safe.”

  But what about Marla? And me?

  “You’re an intelligent man, Dr. Ahearn,” the short man went on. “You must see that we really won’t stop at anything. We thought you should know that from the start. Bad as that is,” he glanced at Marla’s hand, “it will get much worse for your little girls if you don’t do what I say.”

  Brian nodded. “I’ll do it.”

  “Of course you will.”

  “I want to see my girls first,” Brian insisted. “I’m not doing anything if I don’t see them.”

  “Fine.”

  He and the gunman who’d grabbed Brian’s arm walked the professor into the girls’ wing, past a playroom and their study with twin desks, stopping only when they came to the large bedroom the twins shared. The girls lay blindfolded on their king-size bed, mouths taped like their mother’s, along with their wrists and ankles. Their ears were plugged and taped, too. Brian noticed the home security light beaming on the wall. But he knew if the men had the wherewithal to take apart his computer, they would have already disabled the alarm for private security service.