He parked the Crown Vic in the nearly empty underground garage at Federal Plaza, knowing the moment word was out on the shootings, the place would come alive.
Gray, as usual, looked the mad-genius part—slightly disheveled, clothes wrinkled, hair sticking up, black circles under his eyes. He was a comforting sight and had rapidly become one of Nicholas’s most trusted allies. They understood each other.
Gray threw his hands up when he saw Nicholas, didn’t mention the condition he was in—black face, burned hands, no sleeves on his shirt, ripped and bloody pants. No time, no time. “This is bad, Nicholas. Someone sent a Trojan horse into the oil companies’ e-mail systems. A simple e-mail, designed to look internal, sent to every e-mail address on the corporate rolls, supposedly from the heads of the company themselves. And inside was a nasty worm.
“One of the staff members at ConocoPhillips opened the e-mail from home, thinking it was a note from his boss. It took control of the server from there, unspooled into the system, started wiping hard drives, and no one has been able to get back in. Their Web folks are freaking out. They called us in a panic. I’ve been working on it since. So far, I can’t crack it. It’s working like a distributed denial-of-service attack, but the attackers have put in their own firewalls. So not only can I not get in, I can’t track what they’re doing while they’re inside. All it took was one click. One damn click. The odds were in their favor.”
Nicholas’s brain sparked. “Are we dealing with a DDoS, stopping outsiders from accessing the company websites, or are they taking remote control of the facilities?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get in far enough to tell what they’re up to.”
“If their goal was to blow our infrastructure, this was a good way to go about it. Is it COE who launched the attack? Have they claimed responsibility?”
“They didn’t have to; their COE logo is front and center on the screen.” Gray clicked his mouse a few times and the screen in front of him turned white. In the middle floated a stylish monogram with elegant, ornate letters——atop a rotating chessboard.
Nicholas said, “We have to get in. The worm could be downloading information as well as wiping the memory off the servers. If so, they’ll have access to everything from internal e-mails to finances.”
“Not to mention they can turn the power off to any of the physical locations at will. So much is run by computers today—they could tell the pumps to stop working, and boom. You don’t need a bomb to stop oil production in its tracks.” He hit two more keys. “Look at this.”
The white screen disappeared, and the Shanghai SE Composite Index came up. Numbers ran furiously along the bottom of the screen, red, red, red.
“You can see word is out that something’s up—the overseas markets are already dumping oil stocks. If they continue the pace of this sell-off, we’re going to be in trouble when the markets open over here. Nicholas, if you can’t get in and stop it, I think we should tell Zachery he needs to try getting trading suspended and not opening the stock market this morning.”
“Let me see if I can get past the firewall and limit the damage. Regardless, we need to ask Zachery to talk to the suits on Wall Street, do some spinning. The media will be wild about this, and on top of the explosion—”
“It’s too late for damage control, Nicholas, since the financial markets are already reacting. We have to break COE’s encryption and get the oil companies back online, pronto, or we’re all going to have a very bad morning.”
Nicholas sent a prayer heavenward. “Send all of this to me, Gray. I’ll see what I can do. Oh, yes, you say some prayers, too.”
16
KNIGHT ON B TO D7