Then, he dropped the pincers back on the counter. Instead, he picked up a long thin white wand. It had a red base, a long middle section — like the cane of a blind man — and a black tip at the end. Decker recognized it immediately. As a boy, he’d seen farmers in Iowa use them on livestock. A cattle prod.
“I don’t know anything that I haven’t told you already,” said Decker.
The Hispanic man with the buzz cut hesitated for a moment, his hands pausing midair as if he were conducting an orchestra. “People say that, of course. But we all have our secrets.”
“No,” Hellard said. “Not him. If he does in fact know something, he’s the kind of fanatic who’ll die before telling us. We don’t have time for that.” He pointed at Lulu. “Do her.”
Decker strained at his bonds. “No, leave her alone. Please. Take me. Take me!”
The Hispanic man moved so that he stood behind Lulu. He flipped a switch on the red handle and touched the tip of the wand to her shoulder.
Lulu flew back in her chair and let out a shriek.
Decker felt as if someone had sliced open his heart. “Leave her alone. Please, I’m begging you. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Then tell us who paid you,” said Hellard. “Who’s behind these attacks?”
“No one paid me,” said Decker. He watched as the Hispanic man touched Lulu again. Her body convulsed as she screamed. Her arms strained at her handcuffs, her legs shot out from the chair. For a moment, Decker was convinced it would topple over, she was shaking so much.
“If you tell us, I’ll tell him to stop,” Hellard said.
The Hispanic man touched the tip of the cattle prod to Lulu’s left ear. Her head flew back, her back arched and she let out another blood-curdling scream that seemed to linger in the air for a moment, trapped by the confines of the utility room. Then, it fell back to earth.
Decker’s head collapsed onto his chest. He began to weep silently, tears coursing down both of his cheeks. “Whatever you want me to tell you,” he pleaded, “I’ll tell you. Just stop hurting her, please. Tell me what you want me to say and I’ll say it. Anything. Please. I’m begging you. Anything.”
And Lulu stopped screaming. Just like that. One minute she was writhing in agony, the next she was silent and still.
“Forget it,” she said, matter-of-factly. She turned to McCullough and Hellard. “He’s obviously telling the truth. I told you. He doesn’t know anything. This is fucking pointless. Untie me.”
Hellard looked furious. “What are you talking about? He was just about to tell us his contact.”
“No, he wasn’t. I warned you this was a stupid idea. I told you but you wouldn’t listen. Get me out of these things.”
The Hispanic man looked over at Hellard. Hellard nodded and the man with the buzz cut leaned down to unfasten her handcuffs and manacles. A moment later, Lulu climbed to her feet. She began massaging her wrists.
Decker was speechless. It was as if the whole world had suddenly dropped out from under his feet.
Lulu walked over to him. She squatted down right beside him. “I’m sorry, John” she said. “But we had to be sure. Everything pointed to you. HAL2 made certain of that.”
That’s when the power went out.
Blackout!
For one desperate moment, Decker thought someone had slipped the hood back over his head. Until he felt Lulu’s fingers groping his face. Their cheeks touched for an instant in the darkness. He could feel the heat from her skin. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Decker brought his mouth close to her ear. “La hija de la gata,” he hissed.
“What the hell?” said McCullough. “A power outage? At the Fort?”
The door above the loading dock suddenly opened and a young soldier with a flashlight appeared. “Sir,” the man shouted. “Associate Director Hellard?”
“Over here,” Hellard said. “What’s going on, Corporal?”
“I’m to escort you and your party to the emergency zone,” said the soldier. “Power’s out, sir.”
“The whole base? How can that be? What about back-up generators, redundancy systems, power cells?”
The soldier hesitated. He shone the light down from the loading dock onto the tableau below. Onto Hellard’s face, then McCullough’s, onto the man with the buzz cut. Onto Lulu and Decker, still chained to his chair.
“No, sir. Not just the base,” the soldier answered quite sheepishly. “The entire East Coast.”
CHAPTER 52
They were crowded into a small situation room in one of the lower levels of the Fort. It was a monitoring station, equipped with various telecom and IP connections. At first, Decker had thought that he’d be shuttled away to some cell somewhere, in the bowels of NSA headquarters. But Lulu prevailed upon Hellard and McCullough to allow him to stay. “He may prove useful yet,” she insisted.
In the end, it was due more to the distracting nature of the rapidly changing attack than to Decker’s usefulness that he found himself handcuffed and stuffed into one corner of the situation room as the rest of the group huddled around the rectangular table, gawking at the 40” flat screen TVs on the wall. The main overhead lights were out and the emergency lights cast a bright halogen glow on the room so that the human shadows on the conference room table looked odd and disjointed, like Punkawan shadow puppets.
Apparently, NSA had issued a CRITIC alert, a deceptively innocuous, one-line transmission announcing that various zero day malware programs had been spotted moving about on the Net. The malware was targeting critical infrastructure.
A young African-American Army Captain named Gabby Dixon manned the station. She read off the reports as they came in online, or patched the group in by telephone or secure videoconference. Well, allegedly secure. No one was certain anymore.
The Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency had just briefed the Secretary of Defense. Not only had the unclassified Department of Defense NIPRNET collapsed, Dixon told them, but routers throughout the entire network were failing due to intermittent power outages. “Network traffic is essentially down,” she said. “And… wait a minute.” She stared at the monitor in disbelief. “So are SIPRNET and JWICS, DoD’s classified networks.”
Switching to a mixture of traditional wireless telephony and, eventually, Voice Over IP using her own personal Skype account, Dixon managed to reach a contact at the Pentagon. “The Undersecretary of Homeland Security just called the White House,” the voice said. The man sounded exhausted. “FEMA’s got three offices reporting large refinery fires and assorted explosions in Philadelphia, Houston and Richmond, California. Clouds of toxic chlorine gas have been released by chemical plants over large population zones in both Delaware and New Jersey. I got three calls from a buddy of mine at the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh. They’re getting flooded with reports of systems failures across the entire network. The Deputy Secretary of Transportation just contacted the Senior Duty Officer. He wanted to know if the nation was under attack.”
“What did the President say?” Hellard asked.
“He told him he’d have to get back to him. You know it’s bad when we’re so disoriented and confused that not even the President of the United States knows if we’re under attack.”
“That kind of talk isn’t helpful. Where is the President now?”
“Sorry, sir. He’s in the Beast on his way back to the White House. He was out with FLOTUS having dinner downtown. It’s date night.”
“Hold on a second,” said Dixon. The young Army captain had a pretty round face, with large expressive brown eyes and a short afro. “I’m getting reports from the FAA’s National Air Traffic Control Center in Herndon, Virginia. They’ve experienced a total collapse of their systems.” She hesitated. “Nationwide.”