Nicholas quickly accessed the servers at Dominion Virginia Power and hit a solid firewall. “Okay, so far, Juno does know their stuff.” He looked up, grinned, flexed his fingers, and started to code.
Within moments he’d tuned the rest of the room out completely. The code he was bumping up against was not only sophisticated, it was familiar. He found a back door to the server, something the original company that had developed the security system had given themselves to try and stop exactly the kind of attack they were experiencing.
“Ah,” he said aloud, “here we have a line of self-written code, and wouldn’t you know it—there’s Gunther’s signature. At least I know how to disable it.” Nicholas uploaded his own worm to disengage the attack, then sat back and let it run. “That’s the best I can do by myself.”
Savich said, “First, Nicholas, tell me how Gunther did it, then I’ll call our tech team.”
Nicholas said, “This attack is a DDoS, which as you know means distributed denial-of-service, which normally only disables the company’s website and replaces it with a message, and people can’t log in. But this one, it’s very advanced. The attack vector has taken down their security grid by installing malware to allow remote control of the power system. Malware, according to the signature, purchased from our buddy Gunther Ansell. The positive here, and you can tell your tech team this, is that I didn’t see any excessive activity, a good thing. If they were trying to shut everything down, there would be more movement, the code shifting, being rewritten in an attempt to eliminate my uploads to stop it.
“They may think Gunther’s code is enough to disable the power grids, or they could be waiting for the attack to crawl through everything before they play with the lights. I put up some firewalls, hopefully to stop them before they do.”
Savich nodded. “Okay, good, let me call the team, tell them what you said.”
Sherlock said, “Nicholas, you talked to FedPol about Ansell’s death?”
“Yes. Our friend Pierre Menard was going to take over the investigation, but we haven’t heard from him in several hours.” He glanced at his screen, made a few adjustments to his code. “This isn’t exactly the same type of attack as the oil companies—it’s not downloading financial and intellectual information, but it is similar. With Gunther’s signature again, I’d say it’s probably COE.”
“Of course it’s got to be COE,” Sherlock said. “Who else could it be?”
51
PAWN TO H3
Mike looked at each of them in turn. “Yes, it’s COE. After Bayway, who knows what they’re after? They are trying to take down the Richmond grid for a reason. It’s up to us to figure out what that reason is.”
She picked up a paperweight off Savich’s desk, passed it from hand to hand. “What I find amazing with this escalation is that COE has lost two important members in that fire in Brooklyn—Ian McGuire, the IRA bomber, and Vanessa Grace, bomb builder and undercover CIA. And don’t forget the Middle Eastern man working with them. Who is he and what is his expertise? What is his purpose being with them? With the losses, it’s amazing they’ve continued, much less escalated.”
An agent appeared in the doorway, a manic grin on his face.
“Good news, Davis?” Sherlock asked him.
Savich said, “Agent Davis Sullivan, meet Agent Mike Caine, and you already met Nicholas Drummond. Why are you grinning like a fool?”