“Whoever you are, the other five of you are witnesses to what I’ve just said. I will pardon you of all your crimes if you cooperate with me, if you help me stop the virus and tell me who is behind this.
“And I will classify the information. You will resign your position and leave the country immediately and never come back. Nobody will know why you left. Nobody will know what you did. If you received money from our enemy, you can keep it. You will leave this country, and you’ll never be allowed back in. But you’ll have your freedom. Which is one hell of a lot more than you deserve.
“If you don’t come forward now, know this: you will not get away with it. I will not rest until we figure out who is responsible. You will be prosecuted and convicted of so many crimes I couldn’t list them all. But one of them will be treason against the United States. You will be sentenced to death.”
I take a breath. “So that’s it,” I say. “You can choose freedom, and probably riches, with a complete cover-up of what you’ve done. Or you can be remembered as the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg or the Robert Hanssen of this generation. This is the easiest decision you’ll ever have to make.
“This offer expires in thirty minutes or until the virus goes off, whichever is sooner,” I say. “Make a good decision.”
I terminate the connection and walk out of the room.
Chapter
90
I stand in the kitchen looking out over the backyard, the woods. The light is quickly dimming outside. It’s an hour, give or take, until sunset, and the sun has fallen behind the trees. “Saturday in America” has only five hours remaining.
And it’s been eleven minutes and thirty seconds since I issued my offer to the circle of six.
Noya Baram walks up beside me. Takes my hand, wraps her bony, delicate fingers in mine.
“I wanted to give my country a new spirit,” I say. “I wanted to make us closer. I wanted us to feel like we were all in this together. Or at least get us moving in that direction. I thought I could. I really thought I could do that.”
“You still can,” she says.
“I’ll be lucky if I can keep us alive,” I say. “And keep us from killing each other over a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas.”
Our nation will survive this. I do believe that. But we will be set so far back. We will suffer so much in the process.
“What haven’t I done, Noya?” I ask. “What am I not doing that I should be doing?”
She exhales an elaborate sigh. “Are you preparing to mobilize all active and reserve forces if necessary to preserve order?”
“Yes.”
“Have you secured the leadership of the other two branches of government?”
“Yes.”
“Are you preparing emergency measures to stabilize the markets?”
“Already drafted,” I say. “What I mean, Noya, is what am I not doing to stop this?”
“Ah. What do you do when you know an enemy is coming and you can’t stop it?” She turns to me. “There are many world leaders in history who would have liked to know the answer to that question.”
“Count me as one of them.”
She turns and looks at me. “What did you do in Iraq when your plane was shot down?”
A helicopter, actually—a Black Hawk on a search-and-rescue mission for a downed F-16 pilot near Basra. The time between the Iraqi SAM obliterating our tail section and the bird spiraling to the ground couldn’t have been more than five or ten seconds.
I shrug. “I just prayed for myself and my team and told myself I wouldn’t give up any information.”
That’s my standard line. Only Rachel and Danny know the truth.
I’d somehow been tossed from the rapidly descending aircraft. To this day it’s a blur of spinning, stomach-churning motion, the smoke and smell of aircraft fuel gagging me. Then the desert sand rose up to absorb much of my contorted hard landing but knocked the wind from me nonetheless.
Sand in my eyes, sand in my mouth. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. But I could hear. I could hear the animated shouts of the Republican Guard approaching, calling out to one another in their native tongue, their voices growing closer.
My rifle was nowhere in sight. I tried to make my right arm work. I tried to roll over. But I couldn’t reach it. My sidearm was pinned underneath my body.
I couldn’t move at all. My collarbone was shattered, my shoulder badly dislocated, my arm like an appendage broken off a toy doll under the weight of my body.
So the next best thing I could do—the only thing I could do, helpless as I was—was lie perfectly still and hope that when the Iraqis arrived to claim their prize, they’d think I was already—
Wait.
I grab Noya’s arm. She jumps in surprise.
Without another word to her, I rush down the stairs to the war room. Casey almost jumps out of her chair when she sees me, the look on my face.
“What?” she asks.
“We can’t kill this thing,” I say. “And we can’t clean up its damage afterward.”
“Right…”
“What if we tricked it?” I ask.
“Tricked it—”
“You said when you delete files, they become inactive, right?”
“Yes.”
“And the virus only overwrites active files, right? That’s what you said.”
“Yes. So…”
“So?” I rush over to Casey, grab her by the shoulders.
“What if we play dead?” I say.
Chapter
91
Play dead,” says Casey, repeating my words. “We destroy the data before the virus can destroy it?”
“Well—I’m going by what you told me,” I say. “You said when files are deleted, they aren’t really deleted. They’re just marked as deleted. They don’t disappear forever, but they become inactive.”
She nods.
“And you told me the virus only overwrites active files,” I continue. “So it won’t overwrite inactive, marked-as-deleted files.”
Augie, standing near the smartboard now, wags a finger. “You are suggesting we delete all active files on the computer.”
“Yes,” I say. “When it’s time for the virus to activate, it opens its eyes and sees no active files to delete. It’s like—well, here: it’s like the virus is an assassin, an assassin whose job is to walk into a room and shoot everyone inside. But when he gets inside, everyone’s already dead. Or so he thinks. So he never pulls out his gun. He just turns around and leaves, because his work was already done for him.”
“So we mark every active file as deleted,” says Casey. “Then the virus activates. It doesn’t do anything, because it sees no active files to overwrite.”
She looks at Devin, who seems skeptical. “And then what?” he asks. “At some point we have to recover those files, right? I mean, that’s the whole point—to save those files, to save all that data. So when we recover them, when we unmark them and make them active again—the virus just overwrites them then. It happens later instead of sooner, but it still happens. We’re just delaying the inevitable.”
I look around at everyone in the room, unwilling to let this go. I have the tiniest fraction of their knowledge, but the more I interact with them, the more I think that might be an advantage. They are way too engulfed in the trees to see the forest.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “After the virus does its job, are we sure it doesn’t go back to sleep, or die, or whatever? I asked you that before, and you responded by asking what happens to a cancer cell after the host body dies. Use my analogy instead. The assassin walks into the room, ready to kill everybody, and finds them all dead. Does the assassin leave, thinking his job is already accomplished? Or does he wait around forever, just in case someone wakes up?”
Casey, thinking it over, starts nodding. “He’s right,” she says to Devin. “We don’t know. In every model we’ve run, the virus overwrote the core operating files and killed the computer. We’ve never asked ourselves what happens to the virus afterward. We’ve never run a model where the computer survives afterward. We can’t say for certain the virus would remain active.”