“Well, sir, candidly, it was the most likely outcome. We threw together questions quickly when we would normally draft them with great care. And the stress level she’s under, whether innocent or guilty, is tremendous.”
I passed a lie-detector test once. The Iraqis gave me one. They asked me all kinds of questions about troop movements and locations of assets. I lied to them six ways to Sunday, but I passed. Because I was taught countermeasures. It was part of my training. There are ways to beat the box.
“Do we give her points for volunteering for a polygraph?” I ask.
“No, we don’t,” says Carolyn. “If she fails the test, she blames it on stress and she asks that very question—why would I volunteer for a polygraph if I knew I’d fail it?”
“And besides,” Liz Greenfield adds, “she had to know that sooner or later we’d come around to polygraphing her and everyone else. So she was volunteering for something she knew she’d have to do eventually anyway.”
They’re right. Kathy would be tactical enough to have thought this through.
Jesus, we can’t catch a break.
“Carolyn,” I say, “it’s time to make the phone calls.”
Chapter
87
Mr. Chief Justice, I wish I could tell you more,” I say into the phone. “All I can say right now is that it’s important that the members of the Court are secure, and it’s critical that I keep an open communications channel with you.”
“I understand, Mr. President,” says the chief justice of the United States. “We are all secure. And we are all praying for you and our country.”
The phone call with the Senate majority leader goes much the same way as he and his leadership team are moved to underground bunkers.
Lester Rhodes, instinctively suspicious of me after I lay out as much as I can for him, says, “Mr. President, what kind of a threat are we looking at?”
“I can’t give you that right now, Lester. I just need you and your leadership team secured. As soon as I can tell you, I will.”
I hang up before he can ask me what this means for next week’s select committee hearing, which assuredly was on his mind. He probably thinks I’m trying to throw up some diversion to distract the country from what he’s trying to do to me. A guy like Lester, it’s the first place his mind would travel. Here we are, treating this like a DEFCON 1 scenario, including taking action to secure the continuity of our government, and he’s still treating it like cheap politics.
Inside the communications room, I click on the laptop and summon Carolyn Brock.
“Mr. President,” she says, “they’re all secure in the operations center.”
“Brendan Mohan?” I say, referring to my national security adviser.
“He’s secure, yes.”
“Rod Sanchez?” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“He’s secure,” Carolyn says.
“Dom Dayton?” The secretary of defense.
“Secure.”
“Erica Beatty?”
“Secure, sir.”
“Sam Haber?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the vice president.”
My circle of six.
Carolyn says, “They’re all secure in the operations center.”
Keep your head and find a way.
“Have them ready to speak with me in a few minutes,” I say.
Chapter
88
I return to the war room, where the computer techs are still giving it every effort they can muster. With their relatively young faces, their tired, bloodshot eyes, and the urgency of their actions, they look as much like students cramming for finals as they do cybersecurity experts trying to save the world.
“Stop,” I say. “Everyone stop.”
The room goes quiet. All eyes on me.
“Is it possible,” I say, “that you people are too damn smart?”
“Too smart, sir?”
“Yes. Is it possible that you have so much knowledge, and you’re up against something so sophisticated, that you haven’t considered a simple solution? That you can’t see the forest for the trees?”
Casey looks around the room, throws up a hand. “At this point, I’m open to—”
“Show me,” I say. “I want to see this thing.”
“The virus?”
“Yes, Casey, the virus. The one that’s going to destroy our country, if you weren’t sure which virus I meant.”
Everyone’s on edge, frazzled, an air of desperation in the room.
“Sorry, sir.” She drops her head and goes to work on a laptop. “I’ll use the smartscreen,” she says, and for the first time I notice that the whiteboard is really some kind of computer smartboard.
I look over at the smartscreen. A long menu of files suddenly appears. Casey scrolls down until she clicks on one.
“Here it is,” she says. “Your virus.”
I look at it, doing a double take:
Suliman.exe
“How humble of him,” I say. He named the virus after himself. “This is the file we couldn’t find for two weeks?”
“Sir, it avoided detection,” says Casey. “Nina programmed it so it bypassed logging and—well, so it basically disappeared whenever we looked for it.”
I shake my head. “So can you open this thing? Does it open?”
“Yes, sir. It took us a while to do even that.” She types on her laptop, and the contents of the virus pop up on the smartscreen.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a little green gargoyle, ready to gobble up data and files like some demented Pac-Man.
It’s just a bunch of scrambled jumble. Six lines of symbols and letters—ampersands and pound signs, capital and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation marks—that bear no resemblance to a written word in any language.
“Is this some kind of encrypted code we’re supposed to unravel?”
“No,” says Augie. “It is obfuscated. Nina obfuscated the malicious code so it cannot be read, it cannot be reverse-engineered. The whole point is to make it unreadable.”
“But you re-created it, didn’t you?”
“We did, to a large extent,” says Augie. “You’ve got great people in this room, but we can’t be sure we re-created everything. And we know we did not re-create the timing mechanism.”
I exhale, putting my hands on my hips, dropping my head.
“Okay, so you can’t disable it. Kill it. Whatever.”
Casey says, “That’s correct. When we try to disable or remove the virus, it activates.”
“Explain ‘activates’ to me. You mean it deletes all the data?”
“It overwrites all active files,” she says. “They can’t be reconstructed.”
“So it’s like deleting a file and then deleting it again from the trash, like when I had my Macintosh in the nineties?”
She wrinkles her nose. “No. Deleting is different. When something is deleted, it’s marked as deleted. It’s inactive, and it becomes unallocated space that could eventually be replaced when storage hits capacity—”
“Casey, for Christ’s sake. Would you speak English?”
She pushes her thick glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t really matter, sir. All I was saying was, when the user deletes a file, it doesn’t disappear immediately and forever. The computer marks it as deleted, so that space opens up in the memory, and it disappears from your active files. But an expert could reconstruct it. That’s not what this virus is doing. The wiper virus overwrites the data. And that is permanent.”
“Show me,” I say again. “Show me the virus overwriting the data.”
“Okay. We made a simulation in case you ever wanted to see it.” Casey runs through a couple things on the computer so fast that I don’t even know what she’s done. “Here is a random active file on this laptop. See it here? All the rows, the various properties of the file?”
On the smartscreen, a box has opened up showing a single file’s properties. A series of horizontal rows, each occupied by a number or word.
“Now I’ll show you that same file after the overwrite.”
Suddenly a different image appears on the smartscreen.
Again, I’d envisioned something dramatic, but the actual visual experience is decidedly anticlimactic.
“It’s identical,” I say, “except the last three rows have been replaced with a zero.”
“That’s the overwrite. The zero. We can never reconstruct it once it’s gone.”
A bunch of zeros. America will be transformed into a third-world country by a bunch of zeros.
“Show me the virus again,” I say.