Nicholas said, “It’s being difficult.”
“Is that a Brit understatement?” Mike asked.
Savich came around his desk, looked over Nicholas’s shoulder. “No, I don’t think so, Mike. It looks like the threat assessment from Dominion’s security servers ran us through multiple failure scenarios—are you going to be able to contain this breach, or do I call in the IT cavalry?”
Nicholas was watching his worm chew through Gunther’s code. “So far, so good, and I know your IT guys are looking at the same thing, and they haven’t yelled out. But you know, I don’t like the feel of this. What do you think, Savich?”
Savich called his IT department. “Martin, I’m putting you on speaker. What are you guys seeing?”
A man’s very calm, very soothing voice said in a dead monotone, “People, this is an incredible DDoS attack and it’s managed to access the DERMS—the Distributed Energy Resource Management System—which controls the grid itself.” They heard him draw a deep breath. “Sorry, the power is now shutting off, quadrant by quadrant.”
“A moment, Martin. Nicholas do you see it?”
“Oh, yes, I see it. He’s right, we’re going down.”
There was a beep from Nicholas’s laptop, then a series of three in a row, fast and steady, an alarm going off. “Oh, no. Oh, bugger me!” He started typing frantically. “The bloody worm isn’t working now, Gunther’s code kicked it out and accelerated the grid collapse. The DDoS attack is spreading instead of halting. Exactly what I was afraid of.”
“I copy that, Drummond,” Martin said.
Sherlock asked, “How many homes are without power? How far has it spread?”
“It’s happening really fast. Right now, millions are without power, all over Virginia. Even more widespread power and voltage fluctuations, too. If we can’t get it back online, we may start seeing larger failures across the board. Once one system is overloaded and goes offline, it’s a domino effect. If we’re not careful, the whole eastern seaboard could go down. You did a good patching job, Drummond, but COE’s hackers did a superb number on us. There’s no stopping this now. You with me?”
Sherlock’s cell rang, and she listened, punched off. “Can you hear me, Martin?”
“Yo, what now?”
“That was the head of security at Dominion. They’ve put a call in to their contacts at Juno to see if they can step in and help shut this down. He said this attack is so specialized, so perfectly timed, it makes him very suspicious of the assessment Juno did on their systems.”
“Bloody well right they should be suspicious. Someone in their operation screwed up big-time. It’s spreading too fast for us to contain it.”
And the lights went out.
Dead silence, then shouts from the outer office, chairs squeaking on the floor as agents pushed back from their desks. Then a deep grinding noise filled the office, as the Hoover Building’s many generators kicked on and the emergency lighting came on.
Martin’s calm voice came out loud and clear, “Nicholas, look at the grid of lines crisscrossing the eastern seaboard—like arteries into a heart.”
They all stared down at Nicholas’s laptop. One by one, the lines disappeared.
“It’s the worst-case scenario,” Nicholas said. “The grids have gotten out of balance, the peak load is too much, so they’re systematically shutting down. The bastards have managed it. They’ve overloaded the grids.”
Sherlock asked, “Can we get them back up and online, Nicholas? Martin?”
Nicholas said, “I can’t, not alone, anyway. Martin, we need to get together and reverse-engineer the code. They have remote control of the grids, and they’ve managed to use it.” He stared at the screen. “Outages are being reported from North Carolina to New York.” He looked up at Savich. “If the vice president is a potential target, this could signal the beginning of an attack.”