Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) Read online

  He reached for his girls. He was kicked away by a fourth man in a ski mask, who sat beside the twins on the bed.

  “For God’s sakes, I just—”

  “When does their nanny come home?” interrupted the short man.

  “She has Friday nights off,” Brian said bitterly. “And Sundays.”

  “It’s good to see you’re answering honestly. We know her schedule, name, nationality, place and date of birth. We know everything about her. We even know your ‘Hamburger Wednesdays’ professor friend has been having sex with her since your big summer barbecue.”

  The man seemed to wait for a response, but Brian was speechless.

  “All you have to do is open the safe and give us the external drive that you better have locked in there, and these two little girls will have long lives.”

  By now Brian knew there was little hope for him or Marla. There couldn’t be for him, not if they wanted sole ownership of all that he’d developed. And they’d made clear that Marla was no more than a demonstration model for what they would do to his daughters if he didn’t cooperate.

  “Ready to open that safe?” the short man asked.

  Brian walked with them back down the hall toward the living room, noticing his open office door. He slowed when he saw his AAC prototype missing, no doubt disassembled, packed up, and on its way to an oil company’s laboratory.

  Marla looked paralyzed with pain on the couch, still gripping her savaged hand.

  Brian turned from her, removed Eva’s painting, and opened the safe.

  “Take it out,” the short man said.

  Brian handed him the external hard drive.

  Then the leader told the tall bulky man to bring out the pizza.

  He set it on a table in front of the couch.

  “Do you want a slice?” he asked Brian, who shook his head.

  “How about you?” he asked Marla, ripping the duct tape from her mouth.

  “No.” She shook her head feverishly. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Brian, what’s going on? What have you done?”

  “What have I done?” he pleaded to her.

  “No spats, you two,” the short man said. “Let’s eat,” he said to the others.

  And they did. Each polished off a slice. Then the short man stood and took out his gun.

  “Looks like your dinner got rudely interrupted,” he said to Brian.

  When he pointed a semiautomatic pistol at her face, Marla screamed and tried to flee. She managed only to stand before the fourth man slammed her back down on the couch. Her next scream was cut off by a bullet.

  “Sit down,” he now ordered Brian, “next to your wife.”

  Marla lay on her side, hair redder than before.

  Brian shook his head. The ringing in his ears returned, louder than in the garage. He wished he’d listened to the warning. He wished he’d run for help. He wished—

  “Your girls, the little loves of your life? Shall we bring them out here?”

  Resigned and roiling with fear, Brian couldn’t move. He looked frozen.

  “Let him hear one of them,” the short man yelled down the hall.

  The door to the twins’ room opened. Eva screamed, “Daddy!”

  It was the last word he ever heard.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  LANA ELKINS SETTLED BACK in her office chair, basking in the scent of the narcissus that she’d just arranged in a crystal vase. The fragrance was so penetrating it felt narcotic. The narcissus had been waiting for her when she walked in the door of CyberFortress, her cybersecurity firm. They were the flower of the week. NSA Deputy Director Robert Holmes had sent her a bouquet every Monday since she returned to work four months ago. He’d vowed to start her week in similar fashion for as long as he lived. His first card had explained why: “Just a small token of my deep gratitude for all the exemplary work you performed during the greatest crisis of the modern age.” Signed simply, “Bob.”

  Such an elegant term, “modern age.” Who talked that way anymore? No one but Holmes, and while others in the intelligence community viewed him as a dinosaur from the dark days of the Cold War for his attitudes, if not his expertise, Lana felt certain he was precisely the kind of cybergeneral you wanted in place when a crisis threatened to become a catastrophe.

  So while she’d made a perfunctory effort to stop his weekly offering—cut flowers often carried large carbon footprints, depending on their point of origin—she’d relaxed and accepted his gifts, knowing “Thank you” was as much a part of his moral code as never flinching in the face of adversity. Even as Lana suspected her own principles were grayer—more tinged by the times—she appreciated the man’s spine, and, of course, the intoxicating scent of those elegant flowers with their white petals and yellow pistils.

  She indulged herself with the aroma for a few seconds, thinking how much her fifteen-year-old daughter Emma would love a few of the flowers for her bedroom, before Holmes’s first encrypted communication of the week arrived. He wanted to draw her attention to a pair of Russian icebreakers and a cable-laying ship in the Arctic, and provided a link to satellite surveillance of the vessels. “If possible,” he wanted “CF” to intercept and relay to him all communications between the ships and their “masters in Moscow.”

  If possible. In Holmes-speak, that was a command, and one Lana would do her utmost to fulfill. Her success at obtaining these sorts of intercepts had kept her company at the forefront of the intelligence world since she had left the NSA more than a decade ago to start her own firm.

  Still, Holmes’s “masters in Moscow” line reminded her that he was a great fan of John le Carré, and always on the alert for moles and sleeper agents. Once a Cold War warrior always one, she figured of the deputy director. During the crisis last year that had all but brought the U.S. to its knees—and from which the country, indeed, the world was still recovering—Russian hackers, along with their devious counterparts in China, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other countries, had been immediate suspects in the massive cyberwar launched against the United States.

  Remembering the real “masters” of all that mayhem still made her teeth grind, as did flashbacks of the harrowing events that finally led to their defeat. Well, it wasn’t the Russians, in any case. And despite the missive from Holmes on her screen, she doubted the great irascible bear of the north was up to anything more than its usual posturing over the Arctic. But then she immediately reminded herself that Russia’s aggressive actions in the Ukraine made any of its blustering deeply worrisome these days.

  Climatologists were constantly noting that the northern region was heating up two to three times faster than the average rate for the rest of the world. Five fossil-fuel powers bordered the Arctic: the U.S.; Canada; Russia; Denmark, which included Greenland in its kingdom; and Norway. All were looking hungrily at what geologists said might be the last of the world’s great untapped reserves of natural gas and oil. In theory, those five countries were peaceably negotiating over mineral rights. In reality, most were also busy building icebreakers and other naval hardware in case words proved weak in ensuring both national sovereignty and prosperity.

  Already an increasing number of commercial tankers were carrying gas and oil from Siberia through Russia’s Northern Sea Route, a more direct voyage for that nation and the vessels of other countries than the Northwest Passage through Canadian-claimed waters. In either case, the supertankers and container ships now plying those seas each saved many days and upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars per trip over the longer runs through the Panama or Suez Canals. And on those northern routes the captains needn’t concern themselves with desperate Somali pirates. Or hijackers of any stripe, though it was amusing for Lana to conceive of a Canadian pirate party seizing a Russian ship (“Beauty, eh?”).

  In actuality, the Canucks were assembling Arctic-worthy warships at an unprec
edented pace. But if they were really smart, she thought they’d also be building ports capable of catering to the needs of those massive boats—as the Russians were already doing along their portion of the route.

  At least the Canadians were moving ahead forcefully. The U.S. maintained little more than the homely presence of the Coast Guard in the Arctic with two—Count ’em—icebreaking ships in its entire fleet. The U.S. Navy was stretched so thin elsewhere that it didn’t expect to have much of a presence up there until the middle of the next decade, and that would happen only if Congress ever got around to approving the navy’s budget requests for more polar-class icebreakers.

  The Russians, meanwhile, were running nuclear-powered Arctic icebreakers, while building the largest and most powerful vessel of that type in the world. So a great deal of responsibility for tracing Russian and other nations’ activities in the region had been left to U.S.-based intelligence agents using satellite and other technology. Notwithstanding the U.S., at times the entire region appeared to be a free-for-all of competing interests, while the very accuracy of its icy borders—upon which so much negotiating depended—was abused not so much by the threat of war or lesser aggressions, but by the increasing impact of the warming.

  Lana summoned Jeff Jensen, her carefully attired VP in charge of CF’s internal security, though he was also drawn inevitably into naval affairs because the tightly wound thirty-eight-year-old Mormon was an Annapolis grad and veteran navy cryptographer. He had also served with distinction in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Jensen hurried into her office within moments, working what appeared to be a new digital device that likely came from a friend in the tech field. He kept those contacts current, which kept CF on top of all the advances in the soft and hard “wares” of the business.

  “I know about the Russian ships,” he said, looking up as he pocketed the device. “I was getting ready to send you a report when you texted. We’ve already got a satellite photo of one of them. It’s leading a polar-rated ship that’s laying more cable on the seabed,” Jensen went on. “It’s very shallow there.” As it was along most of the Siberian shelf.

  “Nice work, Jeff. So how long before all of that is operational for them?”

  “I’ll bet we’ll know before our counterparts in the Kremlin.”

  She thanked Jeff, expecting him to leave. Instead he sat in the office’s guest chair.

  “There’s something else you should know.”

  His tone set off alarm bells for Lana. “What is it?”

  “We had a double murder in Cambridge Friday night. Our friends at the FBI have been busy all weekend because the presumed target was a Dr. Brian Ahearn, who worked in Harvard’s Computer Science Department. I should also note that the murders have our colleagues at the Strategic Studies Institute sniffing the air.”

  “What’s SSI’s interest?”

  “Apparently, Ahearn was working on a means of extracting carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.”

  Lana swiveled to her keyboard and immediately created a new file. “You’re right,” she told Jeff, “I should know this.” And she would have learned it, sooner than later, being a member of a new, top secret task force examining the international security concerns facing the U.S. because of climate change. “What do we know so far?”

  “More than Harvard does, that’s for sure. They’re just getting clued in now. They didn’t know anything about his research.”

  “How do we know about it then?”

  “The FBI had an asset who had lunch with him every Wednesday. A math professor at MIT. I guess they shared a taste for hamburgers, and Professor Ahearn’s wife didn’t approve of his eating meat. The mathematician’s wife didn’t care, but he pretended to be under similar constraints at home as a means of bonding.”

  “Over burgers?” Lana asked.

  “I know, mind-boggling, but there you go. During one of their secret forays to a joint in Harvard Square—this was about two years ago—Ahearn casually alluded to his research. Nothing so precise as ‘I’m working on Ambient Air Capture at home,’ but enough to have piqued the interest of the mathematician and his minders, who promptly supplied him with an eight-gig fob camera.”

  “How did he manage to get photos of anything more than the burgers?”

  “People do have to go to the bathroom,” Jensen said. “And Ahearn was a creature of habit. He always used the facilities as soon as they were seated in one of the booths, and our mathematician photographed everything he could from the man’s briefcase in the two minutes and forty seconds that Ahearn typically used to complete the trip.”

  “The computer science professor left his briefcase unlocked?” Lana sat back. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “No, never, it was always locked. But it was a combination lock, and they hacked the code from the briefcase manufacturer.”

  “Did NSA do that?”

  “I’m sure Ed could tell you.”

  Snowden. His name came up in this sort of context all the time, not always bitterly.

  “Most of the time the math professor found nothing,” Jensen explained. “But on four occasions he photographed notes and mathematical formulas that included algorithms applicable to AAC.”

  “Did Ahearn actually advance the science?” she asked.

  “Considerably. The last batch of photos showed him on the verge of nearing his goal, from the reports I’ve received. That was two months ago. If he actually pulled it off, it would have been a world changer.”

  “But no final answers, I presume, for the key-fob cameraman or us?”

  “None.” Jensen shook his head.

  “Who was the other victim? You said it was a double murder.”

  “His wife was killed, too, and that was bad. Her ring finger was hacked off before she was shot in the face. And their four-year-old twins were found bound in their bedroom, one still gagged. She reported that black men had been in the house. The other was just as insistent the men were dressed in black. The only thing they agree on is that the men wore black ski masks. The Bureau’s forensic team has found black threads that do not match other fabrics in the house, so we think they could have been men dressed in black. A caller alerted 911 to the murders. Agents were not able to trace the call and presumed a prepaid cell had been used. Whoever did make the call spared the twins having to wait for hours for their nanny to return to the house.”

  “Has she been questioned?” Lana asked.

  “At great length. She’s from Costa Rica, a part-time student at Boston University. Speaks excellent English. She’s not a suspect, just a person of interest.”

  Lana nodded again.

  “The other interesting thing about this,” Jeff continued, “is that the killers took a pizza out of the oven and helped themselves to it. No trace of it was found in the victims’ stomachs, and forensics found the kind of crumbs you’d expect from people casually lounging around eating. The Bureau thinks it was the killers’ way of saying, ‘Hey, we’re professionals. Good luck finding us.’”

  “Well, the chopped finger makes sense from an intimidation point of view,” Lana said. “It showed they meant business from the get-go.”

  “That’s been leading the coverage in Beantown, but what didn’t get leaked was that his hard drive was taken from his computer and his safe was left open. Agents say some of his colleagues think he might have had an external drive in there. Not unusual in their field, I guess. The Bureau has an Evidence Response Team, ERT, processing the entire crime scene now, including the safe.”

  “Did anything get out about AAC?”

  “Not exactly, but there were reports, mostly on the Web, that the professor was involved in some rarefied research, but not the exact subject matter.” Jeff started to get up, then sat back down. “One other thing. The Bureau thinks the professor might have built something in his home office, maybe the prototype.
He was not a do-it-yourselfer, but they found specialized tools and instruments. Nothing definite, but the Bureau has a unit processing his work area as well. A visual observation alone suggests something else is missing.”

  With that, Jensen made his exit and Lana turned to the icebreakers and cable-laying ship on one of her screens, hulls and decks gray as those great northern waters. She was giving herself the freedom to simply think about the goings-on in the Arctic, how fraught such a frigid region had become, when Holmes directed her to join an urgent secure video teleconference, SCVT, with him and the chief of Naval Operations, along with two of the admiral’s top-ranking Pentagon aides.

  This can’t be about those ships, she told herself, not with Admiral Roger Deming on-screen. She was right. The concerns were much deeper and closer to home: The U.S.S. Delphin, a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine, had been taken over thirteen minutes ago.

  By hackers!

  Admiral Deming leaned forward to talk, an old warrior’s phantom-limb response to an absent microphone. “We didn’t believe it was even possible for an enemy to do this. They must have some help onboard. A sub cannot be taken control of remotely.”

  “Is there any communication with the command staff?” Lana asked.

  “None,” Deming replied. “All contact is shut down. And they’ve got twenty-four Trident IIs, most with multiple warheads.”

  “So how is this even possible?” Lana asked.

  “That,” Holmes replied, “is what we need to find out.”

  Lana’s video hookup showed not only her counterparts in Washington, but also the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina. A crosshair indicated the sub’s location.

  Holmes, white hair combed straight back—looking exactly the same as when she had first met him more than fifteen years ago—said the sub was the nation’s highest priority. “The President has been alerted and command posts worldwide are fully activated. We have destroyers on their way down there.”