The President Is Missing: A Novel (29 page)

S
uliman lights a cigarette and checks his phone. Nothing new on the international front. They do seem concerned about the water problem in Los Angeles.
Did the Americans fall for it?
he wonders.

Inside the penthouse, Hagan grabs a silver bowl off the table of food and vomits in it. It was probably the expensive Champagne, Suli decides. Hagan may be a brilliant code writer, but he was never much of a drink—

A high-pitched beep comes from Suli’s phone, a tone reserved for only one thing.

A breach. The hallway sensor.

Instinctively his hand brushes against the pistol at his side, the one with the single bullet.

He’s always vowed to himself that he wouldn’t be taken alive, he wouldn’t be caged and interrogated, beaten and waterboarded, made to live like an animal. He prefers to go out on his own terms, cupping the pistol under his chin and pulling the trigger.

But he always knew, for all his promises to himself, there would be a moment of truth. And he always wondered if he’d have the courage to go through with it.

W
e’re burned!” Christoph says in a harsh whisper. “Team 1 proceeding to green position.”

“Proceed to green position, team 1.”

All pretense of a sneak attack gone, the men rush to the door, fanning out in dual-entry position, five men on each side, two men standing back with the rammer, poised to charge.

“The target on the balcony has entered the penthouse,”
says the leader of team 3, on the helicopter with the thermal imaging.

That’s him,
Christoph knows, steeling himself.

They blow into the door with a staggering jolt. It bursts from its hinges, the top falling forward into the apartment like a drawbridge cut from its chain.

The soldiers closest to the door on each side flip their flashbangs into the apartment and quickly turn away from the threshold. A second later, the stun grenades detonate, producing a concussive blast of 180 decibels and a searing, blinding light.

For five seconds, the occupants will be blind, deaf, and unbalanced.

One, two
. Christoph is first through the door as the white light evaporates, the afterbuzz of the blast still audible.

“Don’t move! Don’t move!” he shouts in German as one of the team members shouts the same in Turkish.

He scans the room, head on a swivel.

Fat guy in purple shirt, half fallen off a couch, eyes squeezed shut.
Not him
.

Man in undershirt and boxers, staggering backward as he clutches a bottle of water, collapsing to the floor.
Negative.

Shirtless guy, dazed, on the floor, a bowl of fruit spilled over his chest.
No.

Christoph moves to the other side of the couch, where a man wearing only underwear has fallen over the couch and lies unconscious.
Not—

And over by the sliding glass door to the balcony, the final target, lying prone on the floor: a young Asian girl wearing a bra and panties and a pained expression.

“Only five targets, team 3?” he cries.

“Affirmative, team leader. Five targets.”

Christoph moves past the Asian girl, already subdued by one of the soldiers. He slides the glass door open and bounds onto the balcony in a crouch, swinging his anti-riot weapon from side to side. Empty.

“Rest of the apartment is clear,” his second in command tells him as Christoph walks back into the living room, the adrenaline draining, his shoulders slumping.

He looks around, defeated, as the five targets are zip-tied and lifted to their feet, still dazed—if they’re conscious at all.

Then his eyes move up to the corner of the room.

At the camera looking down on him.

G
uten Tag,”
Suliman says, giving a small salute to the soldier who cannot see him. The soldier looks so disappointed that Suli almost feels sorry for him.

Then he closes up his laptop as he is approached by the waiter at the outdoor tavern on the Spree, twenty kilometers away from the penthouse.

“Will there be anything else tonight, sir?” says the waiter.

“Just the bill,” says Suliman. He needs to get going. It’s a long boat ride.

I
nside the black communications tent, Chancellor Richter ends his phone call. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

“Gone without a trace?” I ask.

“Yes. The other people captured in the raid say he left approximately two hours ago.”

He was one step ahead of us, as usual.

“I…I need to think,” I say.

I part the flaps of the tent and walk back up to the cabin. My hopes were up, more than I cared to admit. That was our best chance. The last person who could stop the virus.

I walk into the basement, Alex Trimble trailing me. I hear them even from the hallway, before I enter the war room.

I stop at the door, keeping a distance. The techies are huddled over a speakerphone, no doubt talking with the rest of our threat-response team at the Pentagon.

“I’m saying if we inverted the sequence!” Devin is saying into the phone. “You do know what
inverted
means, don’t you? You have a dictionary there somewhere?”

From the speakerphone:
“But WannaCry didn’t—”

“This isn’t WannaCry, Jared! This isn’t ransomware. This is nothing like WannaCry. This is nothing like anything I’ve ever freakin’ seen.” Devin throws an empty water bottle across the room.

“Devin, listen, all I’m saying is the back door…”

As the speaker continues talking, Devin looks up at Casey. “He’s still talking about WannaCry. He’s making
me
wanna cry.”

Casey paces back and forth. “This is a dead end,” she says.

I turn and leave the room. They’ve already answered my question.

“I’m going to the communications room,” I tell Alex. He follows me to the door, but I enter alone.

I close the door behind me. Turn off the light.

I sink to the floor and squeeze my eyes shut, though it is already dark.

I reach into my pocket, take out my Ranger coin, and start reciting.

“I volunteered as a Ranger, fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession…”

The utter destruction of a nation of three hundred million people. Three hundred
million
people, ruined and desperate and terrified, everything stolen from them—their safety, their security, their savings, their dreams—everything shattered by a few geniuses with a computer.

“…my country expects me to move further, faster and fight harder than any other soldier…

“…I will shoulder more than my share of the task, whatever it may be, 100 percent and then some…”

Hundreds of test computers, used and useless. Our best experts utterly clueless about how to stop the virus. A virus that could hit at any minute, the one man capable of stopping the virus toying with us, watching from a remote location as German special forces invaded his penthouse.

“…I shall defeat them on the field of battle…

“Surrender is not a Ranger word.”

Maybe not, but if the virus takes hold, I will have no choice but to impose the most authoritarian of measures just to keep people from killing one another for food, clean water, and shelter.

If that happens, we will be unrecognizable. We will no longer be the United States of America as anyone has ever known it or conceived of it. To say nothing of the fact that with all the troubles on the streets of America, there’s a real chance we’ll find ourselves in a war with the likelihood of nuclear exchanges greater than at any time since Kennedy and Khrushchev.

I need to talk to somebody besides myself. I grab my phone and dial my go-to guy. After three rings, Danny Akers picks up.

“Mr. President,”
he says.

Just hearing his voice lifts my spirits.

“I don’t know what to do, Danny. I feel like I’ve walked right into an ambush. I’m out of rabbits and hats to pull them out of. They might beat us this time. I don’t have the answer.”

“You will, though. You always do, always have.”

“But this is different.”

“Remember when you deployed with Bravo Company to Desert Storm? What happened? Even though you hadn’t even been to Ranger School yet, they made you a corporal so you could be team leader after Donlin got wounded in Basra. Probably the fastest rise to team leader in Bravo Company history.”

“That was different, too.”

“You didn’t get promoted for no reason, Jon. Especially over all the other people who’d been to the academy. Why?”

“I don’t know. But that was—”

“Shit, I even heard about it stateside. It got around. The lieutenant said that when Donlin went down and you were under enemy fire, you stepped up. He called you ‘a born leader who kept his head and found a way.’ He was
right
. Jonathan Lincoln Duncan—and I’m not saying this because I love you—
there is no one I’d rather have in charge right now.”

Whether he’s right or not, and whether I believe it or not, I am in charge. Time to quit whining and suck it up.

“Thanks, Danny.” I push myself to my feet. “You’re full of shit, but thanks.”

“Keep your head and find a way, Mr. President,”
he says.

I
punch out the phone call and flip on the overhead light. Before I can open the door, I get another call. It’s Carolyn.

“Mr. President, I have Liz on the line.”

“Mr. President, we conducted the polygraph on the vice president,”
says Liz.
“The results were inconclusive.”

“Meaning what?” I ask.

“Meaning ‘no opinion on deception,’ sir.”

“So what do we make of that?”

“Well, sir, candidly, it was the most likely outcome. We threw together questions quickly when we would normally draft them with great care. And the stress level she’s under, whether innocent or guilty, is tremendous.”

I passed a lie-detector test once. The Iraqis gave me one. They asked me all kinds of questions about troop movements and locations of assets. I lied to them six ways to Sunday, but I passed. Because I was taught countermeasures. It was part of my training. There are ways to beat the box.

“Do we give her points for volunteering for a polygraph?” I ask.

“No, we don’t,”
says Carolyn.
“If she fails the test, she blames it on stress and she asks that very question—why would I volunteer for a polygraph if I knew I’d fail it?”

“And besides,”
Liz Greenfield adds,
“she had to know that sooner or later we’d come around to polygraphing her and everyone else. So she was volunteering for something she knew she’d have to do eventually anyway.”

They’re right. Kathy would be tactical enough to have thought this through.

Jesus, we can’t catch a break.

“Carolyn,” I say, “it’s time to make the phone calls.”

M
r. Chief Justice, I wish I could tell you more,” I say into the phone. “All I can say right now is that it’s important that the members of the Court are secure, and it’s critical that I keep an open communications channel with you.”

“I understand, Mr. President,”
says the chief justice of the United States.
“We are all secure. And we are all praying for you and our country.”

The phone call with the Senate majority leader goes much the same way as he and his leadership team are moved to underground bunkers.

Lester Rhodes, instinctively suspicious of me after I lay out as much as I can for him, says,
“Mr. President, what kind of a threat are we looking at?”

“I can’t give you that right now, Lester. I just need you and your leadership team secured. As soon as I can tell you, I will.”

I hang up before he can ask me what this means for next week’s select committee hearing, which assuredly was on his mind. He probably thinks I’m trying to throw up some diversion to distract the country from what he’s trying to do to me. A guy like Lester, it’s the first place his mind would travel. Here we are, treating this like a DEFCON 1 scenario, including taking action to secure the continuity of our government, and he’s still treating it like cheap politics.

Inside the communications room, I click on the laptop and summon Carolyn Brock.

“Mr. President,”
she says,
“they’re all secure in the operations center.”

“Brendan Mohan?” I say, referring to my national security adviser.

“He’s secure, yes.”

“Rod Sanchez?” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“He’s secure,”
Carolyn says.

“Dom Dayton?” The secretary of defense.

“Secure.”

“Erica Beatty?”

“Secure, sir.”

“Sam Haber?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the vice president.”

My circle of six.

Carolyn says,
“They’re all secure in the operations center.”

Keep your head and find a way.

“Have them ready to speak with me in a few minutes,” I say.

I
return to the war room, where the computer techs are still giving it every effort they can muster. With their relatively young faces, their tired, bloodshot eyes, and the urgency of their actions, they look as much like students cramming for finals as they do cybersecurity experts trying to save the world.

“Stop,” I say. “Everyone stop.”

The room goes quiet. All eyes on me.

“Is it possible,” I say, “that you people are too damn smart?”

“Too smart, sir?”

“Yes. Is it possible that you have so much knowledge, and you’re up against something so sophisticated, that you haven’t considered a simple solution? That you can’t see the forest for the trees?”

Casey looks around the room, throws up a hand. “At this point, I’m open to—”

“Show me,” I say. “I want to see this thing.”

“The virus?”

“Yes, Casey, the virus. The one that’s going to destroy our country, if you weren’t sure which virus I meant.”

Everyone’s on edge, frazzled, an air of desperation in the room.

“Sorry, sir.” She drops her head and goes to work on a laptop. “I’ll use the smartscreen,” she says, and for the first time I notice that the whiteboard is really some kind of computer smartboard.

I look over at the smartscreen. A long menu of files suddenly appears. Casey scrolls down until she clicks on one.

“Here it is,” she says. “Your virus.”

I look at it, doing a double take:

“How humble of him,” I say. He named the virus after himself. “This is the file we couldn’t find for two weeks?”

“Sir, it avoided detection,” says Casey. “Nina programmed it so it bypassed logging and—well, so it basically disappeared whenever we looked for it.”

I shake my head. “So can you open this thing? Does it open?”

“Yes, sir. It took us a while to do even that.” She types on her laptop, and the contents of the virus pop up on the smartscreen.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a little green gargoyle, ready to gobble up data and files like some demented Pac-Man.

It’s just a bunch of scrambled jumble. Six lines of symbols and letters—ampersands and pound signs, capital and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation marks—that bear no resemblance to a written word in any language.

“Is this some kind of encrypted code we’re supposed to unravel?”

“No,” says Augie. “It is obfuscated. Nina obfuscated the malicious code so it cannot be read, it cannot be reverse-engineered. The whole point is to make it unreadable.”

“But you re-created it, didn’t you?”

“We did, to a large extent,” says Augie. “You’ve got great people in this room, but we can’t be sure we re-created everything. And we know we did not re-create the timing mechanism.”

I exhale, putting my hands on my hips, dropping my head.

“Okay, so you can’t disable it. Kill it. Whatever.”

Casey says, “That’s correct. When we try to disable or remove the virus, it activates.”

“Explain ‘activates’ to me. You mean it deletes all the data?”

“It overwrites all active files,” she says. “They can’t be reconstructed.”

“So it’s like deleting a file and then deleting it again from the trash, like when I had my Macintosh in the nineties?”

She wrinkles her nose. “No. Deleting is different. When something is deleted, it’s marked as deleted. It’s inactive, and it becomes unallocated space that could eventually be replaced when storage hits capacity—”

“Casey, for Christ’s sake. Would you speak English?”

She pushes her thick glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t really matter, sir. All I was saying was, when the user deletes a file, it doesn’t disappear immediately and forever. The computer marks it as deleted, so that space opens up in the memory, and it disappears from your active files. But an expert could reconstruct it. That’s not what this virus is doing. The wiper virus overwrites the data. And
that
is permanent.”

“Show me,” I say again. “Show me the virus overwriting the data.”

“Okay. We made a simulation in case you ever wanted to see it.” Casey runs through a couple things on the computer so fast that I don’t even know what she’s done. “Here is a random active file on this laptop. See it here? All the rows, the various properties of the file?”

On the smartscreen, a box has opened up showing a single file’s properties. A series of horizontal rows, each occupied by a number or word.

“Now I’ll show you that same file after the overwrite.”

Suddenly a different image appears on the smartscreen.

Again, I’d envisioned something dramatic, but the actual visual experience is decidedly anticlimactic.

“It’s identical,” I say, “except the last three rows have been replaced with a zero.”

“That’s the overwrite. The zero. We can never reconstruct it once it’s gone.”

A bunch of zeros. America will be transformed into a third-world country by a bunch of zeros.

“Show me the virus again,” I say.

She pops it back on the screen, the amalgamation of numbers and symbols and letters.

“So this thing goes kaboom, and everything vanishes like that?” I snap my fingers.

“Not quite,” says Casey. “Some wiper viruses act that way. This one goes file by file. It’s fairly quick, but it’s slower than the snap of a finger. It’s like the difference between dying suddenly from a massive coronary versus dying slowly from cancer.”

“How slow is slowly?”

“Maybe, I don’t know, about twenty minutes.”

Find a way.

“That thing has a timing mechanism inside it?”

“It might. We can’t tell.”

“Well, what’s the other possibility?”

“That it’s waiting for a command to execute. That the viruses in each affected device are communicating with one another. One of them will issue a command to execute, and they all will, simultaneously.”

I look at Augie. “Which is it?”

He shrugs. “I do not know. I’m sorry. Nina did not share that with me.”

“Well, can’t we play with the time?” I ask. “Can’t we change the time on the computer so it’s a different year? If it’s set to go off today, can’t we change the clock and calendar back a century? So it thinks it has to wait a hundred years to go off? I mean, how the hell does this virus know what date and what year it is if we tell it something different?”

Augie shakes his head. “Nina would not have tied it to a computer’s clock,” he says. “It’s too imprecise and too easy to manipulate. Either it’s master-controlled or she gave it a specific amount of time. She would start back from the desired date and time, calculate it in terms of seconds, and tell it to detonate in that many seconds.”

“Three years ago she did that?”

“Yes, Mr. President. It would be simple multiplication. It would be trillions of seconds, but so be it. It’s still just mathematics.”

I deflate.

“If you can’t change the timer,” I ask, “how did you guys make this virus go off?”

“We tried to remove the virus or disable it,” says Devin. “And it detonated. It has a trigger function, like a booby trap, that recognizes hostile activity.”

“Nina did not expect anyone to ever detect it,” says Augie. “And she was correct. No one did. But she installed this trigger in case someone did.”

“Okay,” I say, pacing the room. “Work with me. Think big picture. Big picture but simple.”

Everyone nods, concentrating, as if readjusting their thinking. These people are accustomed to sophistication, to brainteasers, to matching wits with other experts.

“Can we—can we somehow quarantine the virus? Put it inside a box that it can’t see out of?”

Augie is shaking his head before I’ve finished my sentence. “It will overwrite all active files, Mr. President. No ‘box’ would change that.”

“We tried that, believe me,” says Casey. “Many different versions of that idea. We can’t isolate the virus from the rest of the files.”

“Can we…couldn’t we just unplug every device from the Internet?”

Her head inclines. “Possibly. It’s possible that this is a distributive system, meaning the viruses are communicating from device to device, like we just said, and one of them will send an ‘execute’ command to the other viruses. It’s possible that she set it up that way. So if she did, then yes, if we disconnected everything from the Internet, that ‘execute’ command wouldn’t be received and the wiper virus wouldn’t activate.”

“Okay. So…” I lean forward.

“Sir, if we disconnect everything from the Internet…we disconnect everything from the Internet. If we order every Internet service provider in the country to shut off…”

“Then everything reliant on the Internet would shut down.”

“We’d be doing their work for them, sir.”

“And we’d be doing that not even knowing if it would be successful, sir,” says Devin. “For all we know, each virus has its own internal timer, independent of the Internet. The individual viruses might not be communicating with one another. We just don’t know.”

“Okay.” I spin my hands around each other. “Keep going. Keep thinking. What about…what happens to the wiper virus after it’s done wiping?”

Devin opens his hands. “After it’s done, the computer’s crashed. Once the core operating files are overwritten, the computer crashes forever.”

“But what happens to the virus?”

Casey shrugs. “What happens to a cancer cell after the host body dies?”

“So you’re saying the virus dies when the computer dies?”

“I…” Casey looks at Devin, then Augie. “
Everything
dies.”

“Well, what if the computer crashed but you reinstalled the operating software and booted the computer back up? Would the virus be right there waiting for us again? Or would it be dead? Or asleep forever, at least?”

Devin thinks about that for a second. “It wouldn’t matter, sir. The files you care about are already overwritten, gone forever.”

“Could we—I don’t suppose we could just turn off all our computers and wait for the time to pass?”

“No, sir.”

I step back and look at all three of them, Casey, Devin, and Augie. “Back to work. Be creative. Turn everything upside down. Find. A. Way.”

I storm out of the room, nearly running into Alex in the process, and head to the communications room.

It will be my last chance. My Hail Mary.