Ciphers - Matt Rogers (popular ebook readers txt) 📗

program. We worked with Israel to do it. We used malicious code as a digital weapon. It had never been done before on a scale like that. We pulled it off.’

King said, ‘Pulled what off?’

‘It was called Stuxnet. It was a computer worm. We unleashed it inside nuclear facilities in Iran. We shut down nearly a thousand centrifuges, and the engineers at the plants never knew it had happened until it was far too late. Stuxnet fed the engineers the wrong feedback. It showed everything in the green, when really we were eating away at the infrastructure from the inside. That’s the simplest way I can put it.’

King didn’t visibly react. Slater chewed his lower lip and waited for Violetta to continue.

She said, ‘That’s what happened to the power companies.’

‘Which power companies?’

‘Every single one of them that has a stake in the New York Metropolitan Area.’

‘Why here?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘What’s their motive?’

‘We don’t know.’

A pause.

Then King breathed out and said, ‘Holy shit.’

The stakes seemed to be dawning on him for the first time.

Slater sat back and waited for the inevitable follow-up.

King said, ‘Why don’t more people know about Stuxnet?’

Violetta said, ‘It’s out there. Books have been written about it. But no one cares, because no one in power will talk about it. Not us, and not Iran. Think about it. Why would we? And why would they? We don’t want to publicise it any more than they do. It makes them look vulnerable, and it shows that we were willing to do something that hadn’t ever been integrated with policy before. At least, not publicly.’

‘Digital warfare?’

‘Yes.’

King said, ‘Okay. Work backwards, then. Who has the resources to do this?’

‘That’s the problem.’

‘Sounds like there’s a few problems.’

‘We did some digging,’ she said, ‘and we realised that almost any rogue entity could have pulled this off. They just had to know where to aim.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Does this seem like the right atmosphere to start cracking jokes?’

Now, Slater sat forward.

He’d been listening without interjection, deep in his own head, piecing things together.

Now it all clicked.

‘That’s why they were able to do it,’ he said, his jaw slack. ‘Because of the power companies.’

‘Yeah,’ Violetta said.

King said, ‘Explain.’

Slater hunched forward and stared at the floor. He waited until he’d formed a clear narrative instead of spewing word vomit. If self-discipline had taught him anything, first and foremost it had shown him the benefit of patience.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said to Violetta, ‘but the power industry isn’t regulated by the government.’

She nodded.

He said, ‘So that means it’s cutthroat, suited for competition. And competition means moving fast. It means getting a leg up over the other guy. Which sometimes means being cheap.’

Another nod.

Slater said, ‘So there’s not really much of a barrier for entry, is there? If you were up to date on every scrap of groundbreaking technology, you could get past the old-school computer systems without much of an issue?’

A third nod.

Slater said, ‘You’d just have to know where to aim, as you said. Which wouldn’t be easy to figure out, but you could do it, if you were driven enough and had the resources.’

A final nod.

King said, ‘It can’t be that easy.’

‘It is,’ Violetta said. ‘And they did it. And nobody realised it was possible until it was too late.’

King said, ‘Look, I get it. It makes sense. It’s a simple sequence of events. The power industry wants to be independent from the government. That lets them cut corners, because there’s no oversight. They have terrible cybersecurity as a result. They pass it off as a non-issue, thinking no one would be smart enough to take advantage of the gaping holes in the system. And then it happens.’

Silence.

King said, ‘That exact scenario happens over and over again. Look at history. Something is impossible until it happens.’

All quiet.

King said, ‘I just can’t believe we were so stupid.’

‘We were,’ Violetta said. ‘And now we have forty-eight hours to get it back. Or all five boroughs are headed for disaster.’

Slater exchanged a wordless glance with his counterpart.

Two days.

Accurate, after all.

Slater said, ‘What happens in two days?’

‘Nothing good.’

‘Lay it out for us.’

‘It would take almost that long to give you a list of all the consequences,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure you can imagine how fast things will head south.’

‘Have you started evacuating New York?’ King said. ‘If you know for a fact this is hostile.’

Violetta stared at him. ‘Evacuate over eight million people?’

Silence.

She said, ‘How?’

Silence.

She said, ‘To where?’

Silence.

‘There’s no plan,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I’ve spoken to everyone who might know. Scale like this is unmanageable. It might have been, if there were concrete plans in place, plans for this very scenario. There aren’t.’

You could cut the tension in the air with a knife.

Neither Slater nor King felt the urge to speak. They were hypothesising, leaving the quiet to amplify and intensify until Violetta seemingly couldn’t take it anymore. She sat forward, drawing closer to them, and said, ‘We have leads. We have potential solutions. It’s not the end of the world yet. But we need to move, and we need to move now.’

‘Who’s we?’ King said.

‘The pair of you.’

‘I thought as much.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘What — you want me out there in the field with you?’

‘You’re more than capable of handling your own,’ King said. ‘You killed three men tonight.’

She didn’t speak.

‘Sorry,’ King said.

She lifted her head, pulled her composure together, and said, ‘That’s the reality of this line of work. If I thought I was going to be shielded from the front lines I never would have signed up for the job.’

To take her mind off what she had done, King said, ‘Can you give us a rough overview of what happens in two days?’

She brooded.

Chewed her lower lip.

Then said, ‘Absolute chaos.’

28

Rico stared at a sea of abandoned vehicles.

There was no longer anyone in the city with enough patience to try and wait it out in their cars. The bumper-to-bumper traffic had ground to a standstill hours ago. Pedestrians thronged through the gaps