Steph took a deep breath. “You’re telling me you think China dropped a nuke on itself, on purpose, because of some shadows and because you picked up the mention of ‘insects’ a few times? Seems a little out on a limb. Are you sure about this?”
“No,” Alex said. “And you should have seen Zouskis when she was telling me her conclusions. She might be smart, but she’s still green enough that she was stuck on the ass end of a region in China. The sort of place she could learn the ropes without having to worry about dealing with anything of importance.”
“Like China setting off a nuclear explosion,” Manny said.
Alex nodded. “Like that. But the thing that really spooked her and made her stick to her guns even though her supervisor clearly thought she was killing her career, was the Internet.”
Stephanie sighed. “I know I said I’d have anybody who said ‘zombies’ taken out to the Rose Garden and shot, but if this is some sort of crazy Internet conspiracy theory, if you tell me the message boards are full of chatter about bugs, I’ll have you shot for that too.”
Alex smiled, but everybody in the room knew she wasn’t the type to screw around. “That’s the thing, Madam President. There’s nothing on the Internet.”
Billy leaned his head back. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alex, just spit it out.”
“The Chinese government shut down the Internet for the province three days before the attack. Three days. All access to the Internet. Cell phone towers and all landlines too. Everything. Not just in the village. The entire province. I mean, if you could use it to spread information, it was shut off. They did a good job of it too—such a good job that we didn’t even figure out everything was shut down until Zouskis went back to see if she could find any sort of chatter leading up to the explosion. I mean, an entire province? All the communication shut down for three days? That would be like us shutting down phone and cell towers and Internet for Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Can you imagine doing that? Based on that alone, even if the Chinese hadn’t set off a nuke, I’d expect a serious listen no matter whether the conclusion was insects or bugs or,” she glanced at Manny and had the balls to wink, “zombies.”
The president didn’t rise to the bait. She leaned forward and pressed the play button on Alex’s tablet. “So,” the president said. “Bugs.” They watched the pinpricks of light and the soldiers running from the shadows and then disappearing in the darkness. “What does that mean? Bugs? Insects? I mean, not like smallpox or other viruses you can’t see, but what does it mean that they were calling the weapon, if that’s what it was, insects?”
“We don’t know,” Alex said, “and I’m not trying to argue some sort of horror-movie answer. I think we can rule out blood-hungry cockroaches, but whatever was going on over there, it spooked the Chinese enough to drop a thirty-megaton nuke.”
The president rubbed her eyes and then let her head hang. “Bugs?”
“Bugs,” Alex said.
“Honestly,” Ben said, standing up, “this seems kind of crazy. We should be focusing on the Chinese government and figuring out if this really was an accident, or if it was some sort of rogue thing. Or, and this would explain why they keep stonewalling us on information, the other plausible scenario, which both Billy and I believe, that this is a move toward something bigger.”
Alex leaned back in her chair, and Manny realized she looked tired. Had she been up all night with her analysts? He hadn’t gotten much sleep either. Part of the job, but even more so when there was the chance of nuclear Armageddon. Which he understood. Nuclear war was one of those remote possibilities you had to consider when you were the White House chief of staff and the president’s closest friend and advisor, but he was having trouble coming to terms with the idea of Chinese military insects. Apparently, so was Alex, because she shook her head.