Chapter 18

The White House

President Thomas Jefferson Wentworth had just taken off his tuxedo jacket after a long State Dinner to honor the Prime Minister of Australia, when his private cell phone buzzed. He had returned to Washington especially for this event, having made a two-day hole in his campaign schedule.

"Now what?" he said as he fumbled for the device.

"Oh shit!" he exclaimed when he realized that it was not his regular phone, but the special one he had his daughter secretly buy; the phone that only connected him to the Patriot Sniper.

He looked at the small screen with a feeling of dread.

'I do not need another terrorist attack now. Not with the election coming up in just nine weeks, ' he thought.

Impatiently, he pasted the long decryption key into the decoding app. It soon spit out two messages. He read them, then picked up the phone that connected him with the Duty Officer in the Situation Room.

"I want the whole National Security team in the Sit. Room, ASAP. Homeland Security and State may still be in the building," he said. Then he issued a modified order: "We won't need the Generals for this."

Wentworth began to leave his private quarters, but checked himself. Going back to his desk, he connected the mobile device (it wasn't really just a phone, was it?) to the printer beside his desk. He printed a dozen copies of the message from 'I/O Security, ' then left his private quarters, and headed for the Situation Room.

One of the clocks in the Situation Room showed the local time, 0039 hours EDT, the others showed the time in various key time zones around the world. Samantha Peterson, the Secretary of Homeland Defense, and Paul Ishido, the nation's first Japanese-American Secretary of State, were waiting for the President's arrival.

"What's this all about?" Ishido asked Peterson.

"Ya got me," she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. "But midnight calls to the Sit. Room are never routine. You want a cup?"

"No. I don't like hot caffeine. Got any carbonated poison over there?" Ishido said, untying the bow tie of his tuxedo.

The banter over drinks stopped when the National Security Advisor came in.

"I don't know either," said the perennially boyish Jimmy Musgrave, Wentworth's National Security Advisor, answering their unspoken question.

He was wearing rumpled jeans and a tartan-plaid shirt, and had obviously roused from the bed in his office. The trio had barely seated themselves at the big conference table when the doors opened to admit the President.

"Sit, sit," he said, to forestall the ritual jumping to their feet at his entrance. He hated that bullshit.

He handed them each a copy of the memo from 'I/O Security.'

"Tom and Cali are coming," the President said, referring to the Director of the FBI, Thomas Fitzhugh, and the Director of Central Intelligence (the DCI), Calista Broadstroke. "Anybody else we should invite?"

"We should get NSA involved," said Musgrave, "and I'll tell Bratley to bring his top geek."

"I'll call in my top geek, too ... if that's okay?" said Peterson.

Both reached for phones on the table. All cell phones were barred from this room, except the President's.

"This could be a fake. Where did it come from?" asked Peterson, brandishing the printed memo.

The President held up his pocket PC – or cell phone.

"The only person who has this number is the Patriot Sniper," he said.

"Not a fake," said Musgrave, still on the phone with NSA. "JPL and Goldman are acknowledging that they're under attack. And the night shift at Hoover Dam is saying their computers are going nuts. They're trying to do a manual shut down."

"Where did this come from? How can we trust it?" asked Ishido.

"All reasonable questions," said the President. "It came from my private phone. And who knows if it's trustworthy? All I can say is the Patriot Sniper is two for two in the honest info department."

The doors opened again, and the Marine Sergeants ushered in Tom Fitzhugh, Director of the FBI and the Deputy DCI, Martin Pollock.

Pollock spoke, "The director is in Manila, sir. She left day before yesterday."

Before the doors could close all the way Swan Bratley, head of the nation's computer geek think tank (the 'puzzle factory' as it was commonly known), the National Security Agency, came in. The NSA had supercomputers and teams of programmers, which were thought to be the best of the best ... at least, within the government.

"My team will teleconference in," he said.

He pulled up a computer monitor and hit some keys. Two faces popped up on the screen, impossibly young faces.

"Any change?" asked Bratley.

"Hoover Dam is getting a handle on shutting down. No other change," said the one with the beard.

"You want to get my geek, too?" said Peterson.

More keystrokes led to Myrowitz of Homeland Security joining the computer party as well. Myrowitz was still buttoning his shirt, but the garish display of computer monitors in the background showed clearly that he was in his office. The two from NSA seemed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to go. This was their first Situation Room meeting.

"You oughta call that guy from NCIS. The one who can hack into the DOD computers in about thirty seconds," the President joked, referring to the TV program's ultra-competent geek.

Bratley cleared his throat and said, "Ahem. No, I don't think we'll need him." NSA didn't really have an institutional sense of humor about computer hackers.

"Just to bring everyone up to date," the President said, as the door opened again, admitting the President's Chief of Staff.

She was a forty-nine year-old black woman who could chew nails and spit our carpet tacks. She took a seat near the head of the table. G.W. Roberts was her name.

The President continued, "We have a message from the Patriot Sniper. He is introducing the second memo, from 'I/O Security', his computer geek. He says that we are under attack at JPL, Hoover Dam and the Goldman Sachs trading system. He gives us parameters to give to JPL to block their back door to sensitive data."

"Told you the Sniper had help," said one NSA geek to the other, sotto voce.

"And he offers help," the President continued, unaware of the interruption. "He says he can stop the attacks, and counterattack if we want. He only wants half a billion to stop the attacks on JPL and Hoover. Another three-quarters of a billion for Goldman Sachs. He says he can start within five minutes of me calling him back.

"Hoover and JPL are the biggest worries," he concluded.

He looked at the clock: 0053 hours. The room exploded in conversation.

Ishido (State): "That's blackmail!"

Peterson (Homeland): "It's a trick."

Fitzhugh (FBI): "He exposed his phone number?"

Pollock (CIA): "He gave us a phone number to contact him? Confident S.O.B."

Roberts (Chief of staff) spoke quietly to the President, but her voice seemed to cut though the chatter. "One, get the parameters to JPL. Two, get NSA to help Hoover and JPL. Three, get Goldman on the phone. Four, track him down."

Roberts continued, "Call him back, Mr. President. Stall for time. Tell him we think he's the perpetrator."

Fitzhugh said, "And give me the number first."

The President, looked at his phone, thought a moment, and then read the digits to Fitzhugh. He, in turn, picked up the phone and contacted his office.

"I want an immediate trace on this phone number. It's probably going through the internet," he said.

The President composed a message, and hit 'send.' The message said:

"Thank you for the info. We can handle it from here. Your services not needed."

There was an immediate reply, from 'I/O Security'. It was, of course, a message composed by Io with help from Zeus and Artemis.

"You are attempting to trace my internet connections. That's okay. You believe I am orchestrating the attacks. I am not. Verify for yourselves. Go to (here there was an internet address). Trace the outgoing and incoming traffic. I will attempt to halt the attacks for five minutes, beginning at 0057 EDT."

That was a little over two minutes from right now.

The trace on the phone connection was quickly leading to nowhere. It led to a computer in the Department of Transportation, or to the University of Minnesota, or to an address in Brasilia, or to one of a dozen intermediary computers – the target computers seemed to shift every other letter of the text. The intermediate computers, of course, led to more computers ... and then they just disappeared from the net. The FBI Director was still on the line with his office, but reported nothing on the trace. Yet. He still had hopes. His technicians however, were despairing of finding their target.

The address specified by I/O Security was for an unused mainframe that was still online, located in India. It once had been owned by a toy manufacturer, and now was owned by the Indian bankruptcy court. In one minute thirty seconds the NSA had traced it, but there was no activity.