But my pills are gone. There are no more in my pocket, and the rest were left behind in the bag, in the sedan in the stadium parking lot.
“Damn it.” I dial Carolyn on my phone. “Carrie, I need more steroids. I don’t have any more at the White House, and I lost the bottle I had. Call Dr. Lane. Maybe she has some ex—”
“I’ll make it happen, Mr. President.”
“Great.” I click off and leave the soundproofed office, walking carefully down the hall toward the rec room, near the staircase. Augie is sitting on the couch, looking to all appearances like an ordinary scraggly teenager lounging in front of the television.
But he’s neither a teenager nor ordinary.
The mounted television he’s watching is set to cable news, coverage of the assassination attempt on King Saad ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the growing unrest in Honduras.
“Augie,” I say. “Stand up.”
He does what I ask, facing me.
“Who attacked us?” I ask.
He pushes his hair out of his face, shrugs. “I do not know.”
“Do better than that. Let’s start with who sent you. You said you no longer see eye to eye with Suliman Cindoruk and the Sons of Jihad.”
“Yes, that is true. I do not.”
“So who sent you?”
“Nobody sent us. We came of our own will.”
“Why?”
“Is it not obvious?”
I grab a fistful of his shirt. “Augie, a lot of people died tonight. Including someone you cared about and two Secret Service agents I cared about, men who left young families behind. So start answering my—”
“We came to stop it,” he says, breaking free of my grip.
“To stop Dark Ages? But—why?”
He shakes his head, hiccups a bitter chuckle. “Do you mean, what do I stand to gain? What is…in it for me?”
“That’s what I mean,” I say. “You didn’t want to tell me before. Tell me now. What does a kid from Donetsk want from the United States?”
Augie draws back, surprised for only a moment. Not that surprised at all, really. “That did not take long.”
“Are you part of the pro-Russian camp or the pro-Ukraine camp? They have lots of both in Donetsk, last I checked.”
“Yes? And when was the last time you checked, Mr. President?” His face changing color, fuming. “When it suited your purposes, that’s when. This,” he says, shaking his finger at me, “this is the difference between you and me. I want nothing from you, that’s what I want. I want…to not destroy a nation full of millions of people. Is that not enough?”
Is it that simple? That Augie and his partner were simply trying to do the right thing? These days, it’s never your first instinct to believe that.
I’m not sure I do now, either. I don’t know what to believe.
“But you created Dark Ages,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Suli, Nina, and I created it. But Nina was the real inspiration, the driving force. Without her, we never could have created it. I helped with the coding and particularly with the implementation.”
“Nina? That’s her real name?”
“Yes.”
“They created it, and you infiltrated our systems.”
“More or less, yes.”
“And you can stop it?”
He shrugs. “This I do not know.”
“What?” I grab him by the shoulder, as if shaking him will produce a different answer. “You said you could, Augie. You said that before.”
“I did, yes.” He nods, looks at me with shiny eyes. “Nina was alive before.”
I release him, walk over to the wall, and pound my fist against it. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.
I take a deep breath. What Augie’s saying makes sense. Nina was the superstar. That’s why she was the sniper’s first target. From a practical standpoint, it would have made more sense to shoot Augie first, because he was mobile, and then go for Nina, who was seated in a parked car. Nina was clearly the highest priority.
“I will do my best to help,” he says.
“Okay, well, who attacked us?” I ask for the second time. “Can you at least help me with that?”
“Mr. President,” he says, “the Sons of Jihad is not a…democracy. This kind of information Suli would not have shared with me. I can only tell you two things. One, obviously, is that Suli knows that Nina and I broke away from him, and he clearly tracked us somehow to the United States.”
“Obviously,” I say.
“And the second thing,” he says, “is that as far as I am aware, Suli’s capabilities are limited to computers. He is formidable. He can do considerable damage, as you well know. But he does not have at his disposal trained mercenaries.”
I put my hand against the wall. “Meaning…”
“Meaning he is working with someone else,” says Augie. “A nation-state, some country that wishes to bring the United States to its knees.”
“And one that compromised someone in my inner circle,” I add.
Chapter
41
Okay, Augie, next question,” I say. “What does Suliman want? He must want something. Or they—whoever’s working with him. What do they want?”
Augie cocks his head. “Why do you say this?”
“Why do I say that? Well, why else would they have shown us the virus in advance?” I put out my hand. “Augie, two weeks ago, a virus suddenly popped up on our systems inside the Pentagon. It appeared, then it disappeared. You know this. You said it to me yourself at the baseball stadium. It suddenly appeared and then just as suddenly disappeared”—I snap my fingers—“like that.”
“A peekaboo.”
“A peekaboo, yes, that’s what my experts called it. A peekaboo. Without any warning, without triggering any of our state-of-the-art security alerts, suddenly this virus flashed all over our internal Defense Department systems then disappeared just as quickly, without a trace. That’s how this whole thing started. We called it Dark Ages and formed a task force. Our best cyberspecialists have been working around the clock trying to find it, trying to stop it, but they can’t.”
Augie nods. “And it terrifies you.”
“Of course it does.”
“Because it infiltrated your system without any warning and evaporated into thin air just as quickly. You realize that it might come back again, or it might never have left. And you have no idea what it’s capable of doing to your systems.”
“All those things, yes,” I say. “But there was a reason for this sneak preview, this peekaboo. If whoever did this simply wanted to take down our systems, they would’ve just done it. They wouldn’t have warned us first. You only warn someone first if you want something, if you’re going to make a ransom demand.”
“Ransomware,” he says. “Yes, I understand your reasoning. When you saw the warning, you expected it to be followed by a demand of some kind.”
“Right.”
“Ah, so this—this is why you made that phone call to Suli.” Augie nods. “To ask him what his demand was.”
“Yes. He was trying to get my attention. So I let him know he did. I wanted to hear his demand without directly asking him for it, without intimating that the United States would give in to blackmail.”
“But he did not give you a demand.”
“No, he didn’t,” I say. “He played coy. He seemed…at a loss for words. Like he hadn’t expected my call. Oh, he made disparaging comments about my country, the usual type of stuff—but no demand. No acknowledgment of the peekaboo. So all I could do was threaten him. I told him that if his virus hurt our country, I’d come after him with every resource I could muster.”
“It must have seemed like…an odd conversation.”
“It was,” I said in agreement. “My tech people were certain this was the work of the SOJ. And they said the peekaboo was no glitch; it was intentional. So where was the ransom demand? Why would he go to the trouble of the peekaboo without demanding anything?”
Augie nods. “And then Nina came along. You thought she was going to deliver the ransom demand.”
“I did. You or Nina. So?” I throw up my hands, exasperation getting the better of me. “Where the hell is the goddamn ransom demand?”
Augie draws a deep breath. “There is not going to be a ransom demand,” he says.
“There’s—why not? Then why’d they send the warning?”