She pops it back on the screen, the amalgamation of numbers and symbols and letters.
“So this thing goes kaboom, and everything vanishes like that?” I snap my fingers.
“Not quite,” says Casey. “Some wiper viruses act that way. This one goes file by file. It’s fairly quick, but it’s slower than the snap of a finger. It’s like the difference between dying suddenly from a massive coronary versus dying slowly from cancer.”
“How slow is slowly?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, about twenty minutes.”
Find a way.
“That thing has a timing mechanism inside it?”
“It might. We can’t tell.”
“Well, what’s the other possibility?”
“That it’s waiting for a command to execute. That the viruses in each affected device are communicating with one another. One of them will issue a command to execute, and they all will, simultaneously.”
I look at Augie. “Which is it?”
He shrugs. “I do not know. I’m sorry. Nina did not share that with me.”
“Well, can’t we play with the time?” I ask. “Can’t we change the time on the computer so it’s a different year? If it’s set to go off today, can’t we change the clock and calendar back a century? So it thinks it has to wait a hundred years to go off? I mean, how the hell does this virus know what date and what year it is if we tell it something different?”
Augie shakes his head. “Nina would not have tied it to a computer’s clock,” he says. “It’s too imprecise and too easy to manipulate. Either it’s master-controlled or she gave it a specific amount of time. She would start back from the desired date and time, calculate it in terms of seconds, and tell it to detonate in that many seconds.”
“Three years ago she did that?”
“Yes, Mr. President. It would be simple multiplication. It would be trillions of seconds, but so be it. It’s still just mathematics.”
I deflate.
“If you can’t change the timer,” I ask, “how did you guys make this virus go off?”
“We tried to remove the virus or disable it,” says Devin. “And it detonated. It has a trigger function, like a booby trap, that recognizes hostile activity.”
“Nina did not expect anyone to ever detect it,” says Augie. “And she was correct. No one did. But she installed this trigger in case someone did.”
“Okay,” I say, pacing the room. “Work with me. Think big picture. Big picture but simple.”
Everyone nods, concentrating, as if readjusting their thinking. These people are accustomed to sophistication, to brainteasers, to matching wits with other experts.
“Can we—can we somehow quarantine the virus? Put it inside a box that it can’t see out of?”
Augie is shaking his head before I’ve finished my sentence. “It will overwrite all active files, Mr. President. No ‘box’ would change that.”
“We tried that, believe me,” says Casey. “Many different versions of that idea. We can’t isolate the virus from the rest of the files.”
“Can we…couldn’t we just unplug every device from the Internet?”
Her head inclines. “Possibly. It’s possible that this is a distributive system, meaning the viruses are communicating from device to device, like we just said, and one of them will send an ‘execute’ command to the other viruses. It’s possible that she set it up that way. So if she did, then yes, if we disconnected everything from the Internet, that ‘execute’ command wouldn’t be received and the wiper virus wouldn’t activate.”
“Okay. So…” I lean forward.
“Sir, if we disconnect everything from the Internet…we disconnect everything from the Internet. If we order every Internet service provider in the country to shut off…”
“Then everything reliant on the Internet would shut down.”
“We’d be doing their work for them, sir.”
“And we’d be doing that not even knowing if it would be successful, sir,” says Devin. “For all we know, each virus has its own internal timer, independent of the Internet. The individual viruses might not be communicating with one another. We just don’t know.”
“Okay.” I spin my hands around each other. “Keep going. Keep thinking. What about…what happens to the wiper virus after it’s done wiping?”
Devin opens his hands. “After it’s done, the computer’s crashed. Once the core operating files are overwritten, the computer crashes forever.”
“But what happens to the virus?”
Casey shrugs. “What happens to a cancer cell after the host body dies?”
“So you’re saying the virus dies when the computer dies?”
“I…” Casey looks at Devin, then Augie. “Everything dies.”
“Well, what if the computer crashed but you reinstalled the operating software and booted the computer back up? Would the virus be right there waiting for us again? Or would it be dead? Or asleep forever, at least?”
Devin thinks about that for a second. “It wouldn’t matter, sir. The files you care about are already overwritten, gone forever.”
“Could we—I don’t suppose we could just turn off all our computers and wait for the time to pass?”
“No, sir.”
I step back and look at all three of them, Casey, Devin, and Augie. “Back to work. Be creative. Turn everything upside down. Find. A. Way.”
I storm out of the room, nearly running into Alex in the process, and head to the communications room.
It will be my last chance. My Hail Mary.
Chapter
89
My circle of six, all appearing before me on the computer screen. One of these six individuals—Brendan Mohan, NSA head; Rodrigo Sanchez, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Dominick Dayton, secretary of defense; Erica Beatty, CIA director; Sam Haber, secretary of homeland security; and Vice President Katherine Brandt—one of them…
“A traitor?” says Sam Haber, breaking the silence.
“It had to be one of you,” I say.
I can’t deny a certain relief, having finally spilled it. For the last four days I’ve known that there was someone on the inside working with our enemy. It’s colored my every interaction with this group. It feels good to finally reveal the truth to them.
“So here’s where we are,” I say. “Whoever you are, I don’t know why you did it. Money, I suppose, because I can’t bring myself to believe that any of you, who have devoted your lives to public service, would hate this country so much that you’d want to see it go down in flames.
“Maybe you got in over your head. Maybe you thought this was some garden-variety hack. Some theft of sensitive information or something. You didn’t realize that you’d be unleashing the hounds of hell on our country. And by the time you did realize it, it was too late to turn back. I could believe that. I could believe that you didn’t intend for things to get this bad.”
What I’m saying must be true. I can’t believe that our traitor really wants to destroy our country. He or she may have been compromised somehow with blackmail, or may have succumbed to good old-fashioned bribery, but I just can’t believe that one of these six people is secretly an agent of a foreign government who wants to destroy the United States.
But even if I’m wrong, I want the traitor to think I’m seeing things this way. I’m trying to give him or her an out.
“But none of that matters now,” I continue. “What matters is stopping this virus before it detonates and wreaks its havoc. So I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do.”
I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I have no other choice.
“Whoever you are, if you step forward and help me stop the virus, I’ll pardon you for all the crimes you’ve committed.”
I search the faces of the six as I say these words, but the screens are too small to note any particular reaction.