Trojan Horse

1

“Scalpel.”

The nurse placed it in the surgeon’s palm firmly, without the slap portrayed in movies. The young patient had been brought in more dead than alive following a highway accident. She could not have been more than fifteen years old. Somehow, in the violence and extremity of the collision a knifelike blade of hard polymer had pierced her skull and embedded itself in her brain.

Her vital signs, however, were strong and given its position, if properly removed, the surgeon was optimistic for a satisfactory recovery. She was young, resilient, and the brain had an amazing capacity to restore itself at this age.

The surgery had already lasted for more than three hours. He’d removed a portion of her skull to give him access. He’d picked out bits and pieces of bone until she was clean. But this was the worst of it. Remove this bit of plastic from the young woman’s brain and there was a very good chance she’d live. Leave it in place and she’d die. Make a mistake and she would be left functionally impaired or dead.

Dr. Elias Holt lifted his hand and prepared to make the delicate incision. Just at that moment the lights blinked, then a moment later came back to life. Holt waited in case it happened again. Nothing.

“We’re on emergency power,” Paul Sanders, the tech with the ACPM, or acute care physiologic monitoring system, said. “My data scrambled, Doc. I need a minute to reacquire.”

Holt lowered his hand. There was no need to say anything. The technology this delicate surgery relied upon would soon be back up.

“All right…” the tech began, but just at that moment the lights went out and did not come back on.

Everyone on Holt’s experienced team knew to freeze in place, to do nothing. In a moment, the power would be restored from the outside grid or the hospital’s auxiliary system. A power outage was rare and Holt could not recall a time when he’d been left in darkness during surgery.

The Mount Rainier Regional Medical Center was a small hospital with just eighty-five beds. In recent years, it had added emergency care to its profile as part of a significant expansion. The patient had been brought here because the accident had taken place nearby and her condition was so desperate.

After twenty seconds of darkness the lights sprang on. “Paul?”

“Sorry, Doc, but I need to reacquire my data. It will take a minute or more.”

“How’s the patient, Allison?”

The anesthetist answered, “Stable. No change.”

Holt waited, then asked, “Paul?”

“I’m resetting now.”

Just then the lights went out again.

In the basement, the night supervisor was staring at his computer screen. He could make no sense of what he was seeing. The primary backup generator had started twice, then simply kicked off. There was no power coming into the hospital from the outside power grid. They were on their own and this should not be happening.

He’d been trained on the computer that controlled the power supply but hadn’t done anything with the system since then. It was automatic, computerized. It ran itself. Just as he was considering actually doing something, the generator kicked into life a third time. He held his breath, hoping no surgery was underway.

Twenty seconds later the generator died again.

Kathleen Ficke left the Holiday Inn bar and walked to the elevators. The bar was closing and her night was finished. She punched the button and waited for the doors to pop open.

Ficke worked three or four times a month on such assignments for the Smart Agency. When she’d applied for the job, the owner had explained it to her in simple terms. “When a wife thinks her honey is fooling around, sometimes she wants proof, usually to get a better deal in the divorce. That’s when they come to us. I get a good photo and send a woman of the right age into the hotel bar where the target’s likely to do his drinking. She can’t be too pretty or too plain; she can’t be dressed sexy. In fact, I’ll take a full body picture of you before you go out. You’ll have the guy’s photo. All you do is sit alone at the bar and drink a Coke. That’s it. Don’t talk to anyone, get rid of any man who tries to pick you up, including the target. We just want to know if he’s with someone or if he hits on you. That’s it. You file a report and I give you two hundred dollars. Want the job?”

The work had proven just as easy as he’d explained and the extra money had come in handy. She was tired and ready to go home. Her cat needed to be fed.

She’d spent two hours in the bar and during that time her target had consumed eight bourbons. He’d been at a small round table talking with two men he’d apparently met in the bar. Each of them had given her the eye but none had approached her, not like others.

The elevator doors opened with a digital chime. Ficke stepped in and a moment later so did her target. He glanced at her, slightly intoxicated, and punched the button for the fourth floor.

“You?” he asked.

“Lobby.”

She stared straight ahead as the elevator began to move. He was overweight and she could hear his labored breathing. His face was flush and his eyes watery. Now she could smell the booze.

Without warning the elevator stopped. There was the fading sound of dying machinery in the shaft. “Whoa,” her target said. “Who turned out the lights?”

Ficke said nothing but was acutely uncomfortable at being stuck in an elevator with him. They stood silently until the wait extended uncomfortably.

“I saw you at the bar,” the target said out of the darkness. “No luck, huh? Maybe he got held up. I’ve got a bottle in my room. Once this buggy gets going, come on down and we’ll talk it over.” He moved closer, so close the reek of bourbon flooded across her face. “What do you say?”

Engineer Doug Bradstreet watched the green lights flash past as Trans-American train number 435 plowed through the night at sixty miles an hour. The run had begun just ten minutes earlier when he’d cleared the switching yard in Yakima and now he was picking up speed before reaching the Pacific Coast mountain range.

He wasn’t supposed to do that, of course. He’d been assured he had all the engine power he needed to make the climb, but he liked to build speed and hit the mountains as close to full throttle as reasonably possible. His two linked engines pulled eighty-three cars filled with coal intended for the TransAlta coal-fired power plant near Seattle. Bradstreet enjoyed the motion, the sense of power that came with giving the twin engines their head and letting them run.

The window was open and he leaned out every few seconds, relishing the rush of fresh air across his face. A series of green lights told him all was well ahead. He’d spent long hours this way, the green lights a seemingly endless stream. Just at that moment, the lights suddenly flashed red. Bradstreet eased back on the throttle. Flashing red meant the light system was off the power grid and running from battery power. He slowed, feeling the slight uphill grade suck the power from the train.

Then the flashing lights turned dark. Bradstreet cut the power to nil and the powerful train slowed until it came to rest atop the second of the five bridges the track crossed before reaching the mountains. He removed the microphone, punched the button, and said, “This is 435. I’ve lost signal lights and am stopped on bridge two. What’s the problem? When will I get lights back? Can I proceed?”

“Stand by,” came the answer. Bradstreet didn’t know if the outage extended to his control, but even if it did the facility had a backup generator.

Bradstreet looked down into the chasm below feeling uneasy. He didn’t like heights. He decided to ease the train off the bridge if he didn’t get the go-ahead. Just then a frightening thought crossed his mind. He punched the button again. “Hey, Lenny! Is 389 behind me stopped? Lenny! Tell 389 to stop!”

Trans-American number 389 had been in the switching yard behind him. It was scheduled to run thirty minutes back but it had a light load and would have closed fast, depending on the light system to alert it when it approached 435.

“Lenny! Can you hear me? Lenny!”

At Mount Rainier Regional Medical Center, the generator continued starting then kicking off. The pattern had repeated itself eight times with no end in sight. The patient’s skull was open, the deadly polymer still in place. Three flashlights were now casting the surgery in ghostly shadows. They were inadequate for an operation but alleviated the darkness.

“Doctor,” Allison said. “She’s starting to fade.”

“Paul, do you have status?”

“I can’t get power long enough to get a reading.”

Dr. Holt positioned his scalpel. “I’m proceeding. I need all the light focused here, please.”

What else is there to do? he thought. If he waited she’d die. The lights blinked off and he paused. When they next came on he’d have to work quickly. Do it wrong, he reminded himself, and she’ll die anyway.

2

Guy Fagan finished his coffee as he read the e-mail from a colleague in Washington State concerning the surprise fourteen-minute collapse of the power grid in Yakima earlier that morning. No cause had been found for it.

WAyk5-7863 was considered one of the most stable in the nation. The Inland Empire, as the region was once known, was largely self-contained, walled off from the western portion of the state. Most of its electricity was hydroelectric with a bit of coal and nuclear thrown in, a perfect balance it was thought. The area had a predictable climate that placed no great demand on the grid. Economic growth in the region was anemic and the electrical supply had increased at a modest and easily sustained pace. There had been no similar collapse in years — none, in fact, that Fagan could recall.

It was odd and his colleague was speculating that it might very well have been caused by a computer glitch. That struck Fagan as most likely. Grids were increasingly dependent on computers and specialized software. They were complex structures, far more complicated than the public understood. In the past, during times of great demand, enormous areas had cascaded into darkness, events caused by nothing more than a fallen tree or a collapsed power line. They could take days, even weeks to meticulously rebuild. Electricity, the lifeblood of the twenty-first century, had to be in perfect balance between demand and supply. Computers made that job easier but in providing one more area of control they also made the grids more vulnerable.

Fagan had good reason to know. As a senior software engineer, he was relatively pleased with his position at PGTA. It was his second job out of college and he’d been steadily promoted over the last decade. Since inception, the company itself had deftly carved out a nice little niche for itself in the software industry. In its early days, it had provided generic software of various applications. Now, it produced a significant portion of the code used throughout the electric grid in the United States under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. The transition had been complete when the company renamed itself PGTA, short for Power Grid Technology Applications, two years earlier.

Fagan himself was manager for the project, writing the code for any emergency override of the electrical grid in the event of an attack against a regional substation or its operators. His work was interesting and important. He took pride in that.

He had been assigned to this project after six years on the IT team that had maintained the security of PGTA’s own systems and database. The company had received a number of awards for the protection it provided its clients. In its years of existence, PGTA had never experienced a serious penetration of its firewall. Not one. And that success was due in no small measure to Fagan himself.

He glanced at the list of unopened e-mails and spotted one he was expecting from DASS, Dallas Applied Software Solutions in Texas. It was a vendor with which he frequently did business, one of his more important sources of industry specific code. He opened the message.

At that moment the Trojan entered his computer, quickly finding its way through an unpatched exploit. It had ridden this message to place itself behind the PGTA firewall. There it unrolled into his computer’s operating system, wrapping its tentacles around every function it was targeted to seek and control.

Before Fagan had time to read the message, his screen lit up with a brief flash. This stopped him short. What was that? Revisualizing the flash, he realized that he’d seen something like it before and for a moment struggled to recall when. Then he had it. It had been during his latest security training. The flash had resembled the antimalware intrusion detection warning dialog. Or something very like it. Regardless, he’d never before experienced such an event on any computer.

Better to be cautious than sorry, he decided. He opened the security software and was relieved when it reported everything was fine. Nothing to worry about. He paused for a moment, wondering if there was anything else he should do and decided there was not. He closed the program and returned to his message, not giving the incident another thought.

As he did, the Trojan guardedly acquired the source code to the power grid control software, blending its actions seamlessly into the activity of the computer so as not to attract attention. Before the day was out, the Trojan would also copy Fagan’s e-mail list and the data files in his computer related to each e-mail.

Fagan liked to work a bit late, volunteer some time to the company. He believed it was the secret to his success. He’d never been one to watch the clock and bolt right at quitting time. Just after six o’clock he turned off his screen and headed out, his thoughts already directed toward the problems he’d face the next day.

Some hours later, when the PGTA offices were closed, the Trojan in Fagan’s computer “called home,” inconspicuously transferring the data it had copied. This launched it on a long digital journey from Menlo Park, California, to whoever had written the malware code, the person who was interested in shutting down significant sections of the U.S. electric power grid by remote command.

3

Franz Herlicher looked at his paper again with amazement.

He had of late noticed a creeping tendency to type the wrong word rather than to simply misspell the one he’d intended. He blamed the word processor’s spell-checker for it. If he misspelled, it caught the error at once. Over the years it had served to improve his spelling dramatically.

But he’d noticed that now he often simply typed a similar, but incorrect word, with nearly the same frequency with which he’d once misspelled words. He wondered if a certain proportion of errors were programmed into the human condition and no matter how hard you worked to eliminate error, error always returned, one way or another.

But that wasn’t the problem here. He’d not typed the wrong word. This wasn’t a matter of inadvertently substituting “tenant” for “tenor” as he’d done earlier that day. No, in the paper he’d distributed he’d managed to mistype throughout it, altering the paper in subtle yet significant ways, finally changing the entire last paragraph, nearly every word of it. The reality was that his paper was no longer the one he’d written.

And Herlicher had absolutely no idea how that could be.

The problem had been pointed out to him by his colleague, Lloyd Walthrop, with the UK Foreign Office in London. His e-mail to that effect had been scathing and Herlicher was still blushing from the memory of it. Theirs had been a valued professional relationship and he wanted nothing to tarnish it. After all, Herlicher didn’t intend to remain in dreary Geneva among the Swiss forever.

Educated at the Bavarian law facilities in Munich, Franz Herlicher had begun his career with a brief stint in Brussels, working for an odious Prussian he’d despised. When this chance to move to the United Nations came along he’d jumped at it. He’d been promoted to senior analyst within the Office for Disarmament Affairs and was assigned to draft the final committee report on the Iran nuclear weapons program. His first version had been well received with only a few minor suggestions for changes.

This was a break-out opportunity for him, he was certain. The report’s conclusions would likely shape world events and it was not unlikely that the entire report, with his name on it, would find its way into the public domain. The best part was that even if the Western powers refused to act, he would still have garnered exposure that made the kind of career he’d always envisioned.

Herlicher had frankly been surprised when the committee had voted to take such a firm stand against Iran. He’d not encountered such assertion in the organization previously. He’d determined early on that the true purpose of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs was not to prevent nuclear disarmament or to even accurately report nuclear developments within nations, but rather to evade commitment and responsibility. It was, he understood, the way of the world.

Don’t stick your neck out or it will get chopped off, his father had taught him. Let the world take care of itself. If anyone was truly interested in stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons they’d do something about it, not ask for more reports.

But something had clearly happened to change all that, at least for now. It might have been a sudden realization that a nuclear Iran was a threat the civilized world could not ignore, but Herlicher thought that unlikely. The world tolerated a nuclear North Korea after all. Or it might have been outside pressure, say from the United States, Britain, or even France, even all three behind the scenes, but again he doubted that was the case. The UN was largely impervious to such pressure. Since its inception it had become monolithic, driven by its own internal and self-serving dynamics.

The answer he’d been given over lunch when he’d discreetly posed the question of “Why now?” when the evidence had been there for years had caught him by surprise. It seemed so improbable that he doubted it could possibly be true.

“A source,” the chairman had told him. “A source has come forward with irrefutable evidence.”

“You mean someone came to us instead of the United States?” Herlicher had asked, unable to mask his shock. After all who could trust them? UNOG, for one, leaked like a sieve. Why come to them with such intelligence? Why not sell it to the Americans? That’s what they were good at, buying up people and resources.

And why assume that ODA, as his office was known, would act? Its history suggested quite the contrary. Herlicher had been mystified by the explanation.

“Yes. He’s an idealist apparently and very well sourced. We now know Iran is about to detonate an atomic device. We know where, we know the scheduled date. The evidence is beyond dispute. It has been decided that we will issue a timely and decisive report.”

“Why?”

The chairman leaned forward. “Because if we don’t, the source says he will go to the Americans and it will come out we had the information first. So it’s going to come out one way or the other. Better us since it’s inevitable.”

Now that, Herlicher decided, made sense. ODA had in recent years been largely discredited. This would change that.

In his office Herlicher leaned back in his chair, then glanced at the wall where the window should have been, if only he were ranked more highly on the organizational chart. The old League of Nations had constructed the Palais des Nations in the 1930s. The imposing structure had been assumed by the United Nations after the Second World War and was now the European center for that international body. Some 1,600 employees filed into the enormous edifice each day. The building itself was situated in lovely Ariana Park and overlooked Lake Geneva with a magnificent view of the French Alps, neither of which Herlicher could see from his small office.

Should this report not live up to his admittedly high expectations, his plan was to return to the EU, hopefully in a slot above the evil woman he’d left behind. One of the men to help him with that transition was Walthrop, which was why the e-mail had been so difficult. Never before had words on a computer screen seared him with such force.

Herlicher finished his after-lunch coffee and reread the report once again. It summarized the facts leading to the conclusion. He’d asked Walthrop, confidentially, to run through it and let him know if he’d overlooked any aspect his final report ought to address. He’d been intending to curry favor with the man by giving him an advance peek but his effort had the opposite effect.

His first reaction to the e-mail had been to ask himself how the man could have misread his report so badly. Still, cautious as ever, Herlicher had gone to his “Sent” folder and clicked on the attachment to confirm what he’d sent. Perhaps he’d linked to some early draft or even a different report altogether. Something.

And then he’d seen it. In utter and total disbelief he’d stared at the report he’d sent. In shock, he’d printed the thing out and was now holding it in his hand. It wasn’t the report he’d written. It wasn’t the report he’d attached and sent!

A wave of paranoia swept over him. His immediate thought wasn’t “How could this happen,” but rather “Who was doing this to me?” And why? What possible purpose could this serve?

He’d immediately sent Walthrop an explanation but realized how futile it sounded. Someone had entered his computer, bypassing all security, and cleverly altered his words so that the report said the exact opposite of what he’d written. It was incredible. Herlicher struggled to gather his wits as he reconsidered the situation. Who would believe such a story? It was his report, sent from his office, from his computer. How could anyone tamper with it? And if it had been altered, why had he sent it in the first place? That would be the question.

Still, what else could he say? It was the truth. Someone had found a way to change his report. He didn’t know how, or when, but someone had done it. He followed up by calling Walthrop repeatedly, but either the man was not in his office or he was refusing to pick up his telephone.

Herlicher sat in despair. He wondered if in a moment of insanity he’d really written it that way and now had no memory of the act. Perhaps in some kind of psychotic, self-destructive trance he’d made the changes. He struggled with the thought, earnestly trying to conjure a memory, anything that would suggest such an explanation. There was none.

Iran was poised to detonate a nuclear bomb in less than three weeks. That was the point of the report. That was what he’d written. There’d been no reason, no possible motivation, for him to have written anything else. He had no opinion on the subject, no reason at all for the report to say one thing rather than another. But the report now said there was no evidence to suggest Iran was about to do any such thing.

Herlicher went carefully through the printed report, making a point to highlight every change. When he finished he was surprised there were so few, no more than a dozen words spread throughout, two short sentences rewritten, then the new concluding paragraph. How long would something like that take? Given their totality it didn’t seem possible anyone could have done it quickly.

He rose, instinctively straightening his tie as he did, and paced as he thought this through. Could he be actually suffering some kind of breakdown and not realize it? He’d read once that the deeply mentally ill had no idea they were deranged.

Was he crazy? Ausgeflippt. That was the German word for it. His mother had once mentioned one of her uncles in that way but he’d been under the impression the man’s aberrations were a consequence of the war and his years in a Russian POW camp. Now Herlicher considered that perhaps that was what she’d wanted him to think. He could recall no other instance of mental illness in his family. Of course, his mother could have been lying.

Herlicher glanced at his door quickly. No one was there. Maybe someone had come into his office and made the change. He locked the door at night as instructed but he wasn’t the only one with a key, and to be frank, sometimes he forgot.

Still… someone wanted him to look bad. That was the most likely answer. Who could that be? Though he’d been very careful during his time in Geneva there were always enemies, those who disliked him personally, those who sabotaged a colleague for fun, those with an agenda. And there was always the latent hostility toward all Germans you saw throughout Europe. No, any list would be very long and he was sure to omit someone.

Three others had keys officially but how could he know for certain where it ended? He was not the only one ever assigned to this office. They might have kept the key. That’s what he would have done. Then there was the cleaning staff. Not all of them were Swiss. Some were Italians.

Then he recalled that he was supposed to lock his computer screen whenever he left his desk, but he rarely did so and it locked automatically after being idle for fifteen minutes anyway. The only way someone could have altered his report was to slip into his office while he was away and before the computer went into default mode and required the password.

Herlicher strained to recall the events leading up to the e-mail. What had he done? Had he left the office long enough for someone to make changes? He wiped his brow with his pristine handkerchief.

Now he had it. He’d left his office to use the restroom. He’d finished the final draft and decided to take a break before composing the e-mail to Walthrop. He left the office and passed… Carlos Estancia, his supervisor. Why didn’t he think of that immediately? It was so obvious. The man didn’t like him. How many times and in how many ways had he shown that? But had Estancia popped into his office during the time Herlicher had been gone and quickly altered the report?

How long had he been gone? Herlicher considered it and was crestfallen at his conclusion. Five minutes. No more. That was simply not enough time for anyone to make the subtle changes in the report. And on reflection, the extent and quality of the alterations were certainly beyond Estancia’s ability. The man was a moron.

Suddenly Herlicher collapsed in his chair. Now he remembered. He’d performed a final copy edit, then had sent at once. There had been no delay.

There’d been no time for anyone to sabotage his report. None. Maybe, maybe, I really am losing my mind.

4

Lloyd Walthrop was still angry with Herlicher. The man had called and left a voice mail and now had sent by e-mail an explanation Walthrop refused to read. The German was a cretin. Walthrop had always taken him to be a weasel but until now he’d assumed the man would deal with him honestly, at least until it was in his interest not to.

He’d first met Herlicher the previous year at a Madrid conference on the state of the Iranian economy. It was an area of official mutual concern. At the time he’d seemed a mild-mannered, if a bit paranoid, German bureaucrat. The only thing notable about him was that he worked for UNOG in Geneva. Even that wasn’t especially significant until he’d let drop that his primary duties were with the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs and that he served on the committee tasked with producing any United Nations’ status reports and recommendation on Iran’s nuclear program. That had caught Walthrop’s attention, as he assumed it was meant to.

Walthrop had been pleased at the contact. Since then, they’d exchanged e-mails and reports but in recent weeks he’d impatiently waited for a new nuclear report. Herlicher had been assigned its actual writing and that struck Walthrop as a coup for himself.

Though officially assigned to the Foreign Office, the key aspect of Walthrop’s job was to gather intelligence from the various branches of the UK government and to funnel it to those who needed to know. Occasionally he acquired an interesting tidbit from an EU source and when he did, that was so much frosting on the cake. Unofficially, he’d been asked to pay special attention to the imminent UN report on Iran.

According to his sources, the situation there was coming to a head. More than one national intelligence agency was reporting that detonation of an atomic device in the Iranian desert was forthcoming. There was serious talk of meaningful international action. Iran had flaunted the UN inspectors and sidestepped sanctions for too long. His reading of the current state of the world was much as it had been just prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Storm before it: Something was going to happen.

Some of what Walthrop did was presented officially, though confidentially, but the greater part found its way to the necessary hands through informal back channels. From time to time he was called on to brief leaders in Parliament and the office of the prime minister. It had long been this way in British intelligence. He’d attended the right schools, knew the right sorts, and over the decades had demonstrated his loyalty and judgment. Outside certain circles he was unknown, and he very much preferred it that way.

He’d wondered at first if Herlicher had known his true position in the UK government but over the following months realized he did not. He’d targeted Walthrop for no other reason than he worked in the Foreign Office. But once Walthrop had indicated an interest in the German’s work, the two had formed the sort of bond that existed between colleagues possessed with mutual needs. The Brit wanted to know what UNOG was going to report before it became common knowledge while the German was looking for a leg up in Brussels. One hand washed the other.

Walthrop turned back to the foolscap on his desk and reworked his report with a pencil. He knew it was all quaint, very archaic; his assistant chided him about it from time to time, but he simply couldn’t think straight on one of those computers. He detested the things — and he didn’t trust them. After all, the things were now connected, like so many tunnels from house to house, and the so-called firewalls and other security measures built in or installed failed to work with depressing regularity.

Not that Walthrop wasn’t a man of the twenty-first century. He preferred travel by jet to the alternative and in the last year had developed an appreciation for video conferencing. He couldn’t help wondering about the security of it all but was assured there was no issue and he was careful with what he said.

Still, all those bits and pieces of electronic data out there somewhere was troubling. Better if important information was set down to paper and locked away with a trusty guard outside. Walthrop didn’t think of this as old-fashioned, rather as just so much common sense, though he had to admit there seemed a dearth of that in recent years.

One evening he’d expressed, once again, his dislike of computers. His wife had pointed out that his voice was carried by telephone with electronic pulses, that a telly was nothing more than a computer screen — to which he allowed that explained a great deal to his way of thinking. Why his war with the PC? she asked.

He’d explained it to her again. He knew his protestations sounded silly when uttered but there it was.

And, of course, there was another issue. What he wouldn’t acknowledge to her was that he didn’t type all that well. He’d only learned at university and had never been very good at it. The computer only made things worse by pointing out an endless stream of mistyped words and questionable use of grammar. He preferred to write his letters and reports out in longhand then transfer them by typing into his computer. It wasn’t perfect, it was very slow, but his wasn’t a fast occupation.

Whatever his reasons he was never entirely comfortable with computers. More than once when he’d opened an interesting attachment he’d inadvertently downloaded a virus. It had happened often enough for his lack of computer prowess to become a subject in the greater office. In fact, he’d had a bit of trouble with Herlicher’s attachment as he recalled.

Earlier that day when it arrived he’d glanced at the subject line and felt a wave of satisfaction. At last! He clicked on the attachment, but instead of opening the file he saw the following:

Below the message was a button that read, “Close program.”

Now what is this? he’d thought. Why would he want to close the program? And just how did Windows expect to get back to him? This was one of those questions he never got an answer to. And if Windows, whatever that was, could get back to him about this problem that meant Windows, or whoever controlled it, knew what was taking place in his computer. That was exactly what he was talking about.

OfficeWorks sounded familiar. He considered that a moment then, slightly embarrassed, realized it was the name of the office word processing program his division used. The bright kids from IT had assured him that almost everyone in the world used it. It was the best there was.

If it was so good, Walthrop thought, why did it stop working?

He closed his e-mail program. He’d learned that starting it up again usually fixed any problem he ran into. Then he’d gone to Herlicher’s e-mail and double-clicked on the report. This time it opened without a problem. That was more like it.

He now realized that his response to Herlicher the moment he’d finished reading the report had been an indulgence. He’d been needlessly harsh and berated himself for it. The man might be a suspicious fool but he had his uses and now he’d cut him off as a source.

Of course, he’d misled Walthrop badly, and the Brit had made the mistake of confiding his expectations about the results of the pending report to the foreign secretary. Now his professional reputation, or at least his judgment, was at risk. Just the day before Walthrop had received a note reminding him to make available the advance copy of the UNOG report.

He should never have confided his expectations and with that realization he understood the true object of his anger: himself. He shook his head in wonder. Here he was at fifty-two years of age, and still relearning the lessons he’d thought he’d absorbed decades earlier.

It was, Walthrop decided, the excitement that had been the cause. He’d been eager from the moment when he realized he was being provided with an advance look at the imminent ODA Iran report. This was one of those tidbits for which he was famous within his circles. He’d let pride govern his actions.

Not that the UK government ministries gave the United Nations much credence. It had done nothing to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and technology and wasn’t likely to in the future. But when the UN, of all organizations, condemned Iran by stating categorically that it was about to detonate a nuclear bomb he believed that would finally compel military action. At long last, the United States, Britain, and France were prepared to initiate a military strike to prevent a nuclear test and to cripple the Iranian nuclear program.

As Walthrop understood it, Iran had scheduled detonation of its first atomic bomb for April 26. The essential fuel to make the bomb possible would be processed and ready about ten days earlier. The UNOG report, Herlicher had told him, was due to be released on April 13. That would give the world powers just three days before the enriched uranium was ready, or thirteen days to disrupt the testing site if that was the plan. These were very short timeframes but for such a vital issue they were entirely feasible. Now what had looked like a near certainty was all at risk because the ODA had buckled at the knees. That was the only explanation he could see.

The thought of Iran with a nuclear bomb scared the daylights out of Walthrop. Ever since the Shah was replaced by fanatical clerics, Iran had been the primary source of financial support to Muslim terrorists the world over. The ongoing conflicts in the Middle East were primarily caused by Iran, which supported both Hamas and Hezbollah. Certainly, Israel did little to help herself but it was Iran constantly tossing petrol on the fire.

Supporting such terrorist organizations with state income was Iranian policy. As long as the mullahs held control of that vast nation with its enormous oil wealth, worldwide jihad would continue. And there were times when Walthrop was persuaded that he was one of the few in the Foreign Office who truly appreciated the inevitable consequences.

Once Iranians had the Bomb, Walthrop had no doubt they’d place it in the hands of nut jobs willing to use it. And if his colleagues in the government took any comfort at all from the thought that Iran would stop with bombing Tel Aviv and that the destruction of Israel would bring an end to this madness they were very much mistaken in his view.

Because Walthrop had not the slightest doubt that the second major city on that list was London itself.

He just couldn’t believe that the UN was once again going to back away from the self-evident. Last week when he’d encountered Herlicher in the lobby of the UN building in New York, the German had confided that UNOG had received material from a highly placed source in Iran and that the report he was authoring would give a detonation date and recommend immediate action. Then he’d sent this monstrosity to him instead. More of the same endless dribble. What use was the man? What use, for that matter, was the United Nations?

Walthrop glanced at his e-mail and briefly considered opening Herlicher’s new message. His telephone had rung three times since he’d replied to the report and he’d not picked up, letting it roll over to voice mail. The German had nothing to say he wanted to hear.

Walthrop sighed. It wasn’t the end of the world — at least, not yet.

5

Jeff Aiken stared at the computer screen as he eased back in his chair. Outside, a gray rain fell as it had all day, the streets dark and slick. He’d returned from Atlanta the night before, preferring the comfort of his home to another night in a sterile hotel, and had worked remotely, running the final tests of his fix.

His financial sector client was a household name in the southern states. Malware had been detected by its in-house IT staff during a routine scan of the outbound network traffic from the servers. It had identified bursts of data directed at IP addresses somewhere in Russia. They had been unable to determine the origin of the traffic so Jeff had been summoned.

He’d spent three days in Atlanta. There he’d made a virtual copy of the server using a tool that took a “live” system and produced an image of it. With his forensic tools he located a rootkit-based virus. Rootkit was an increasingly common and very troublesome technique for cloaking viruses from standard detection. They were increasingly popular with malware writers. It had been their prevalence in the attack code two years before that had made the Al-Qaeda viruses so difficult to identify.

During his forensic investigation Jeff determined that the virus propagated from system to system employing a vulnerability, ironically in one of the major security suites, another household name, this one worldwide. He established that it was installed in all his client’s systems. The IT department had discovered the hole and patched it pretty quickly but, as was the case for most corporate IT staffs, they’d held off installing the patch to make certain it wouldn’t cause problems on their servers. The uninterrupted performance of the Web site and database was nearly always considered to be most critical. It was during that delay they’d been infected.

The good news was that the virus was a generic botnet host, not one of the newer, far more sophisticated versions designed to target the company specifically. It was the kind of broad digital aggressor every company encountered from time to time. They’d dodged a bullet because if a virus specifically targeted at them had penetrated their system, it would have caused financial havoc on the company’s customer accounts.

Once he grasped the nature and extent of the infection Jeff had recommended that they utilize the best-case solution, which was to “repave” their system. This meant reinstalling the operating system and server applications, then restoring all the data from the uninfected backups. The CEO had balked at the downtime this would entail, calculating it would be both disruptive and expensive. Instead, Jeff had been told to cleanse the system.

Though faster and cheaper, this was the least certain approach. The enormous size and complexity of the system meant there were countless digital holes in which malware might lurk. Jeff could never be certain he’d cleaned everything. But he understood the practicalities of a functioning business; this was not a laboratory situation. And he understood that taking the system down to rebuild it would have created significant issues of trust and reliability with the company’s clients.

No antivirus signatures had been established for the virus as yet. This was how the usual antivirus programs uncovered malware. As a consequence, Jeff had to do it for himself by defining a series of steps to purge the virus from the system. This malware-cleaning solution then became a script that the company could run on their live server. It would seek out the tentacles of the virus and surgically sever them, deleting its files after the malware had been immobilized.

He’d alerted his contacts in the antivirus security industry to the new virus and made his fix available once he’d developed it. His connections were extensive and he was widely respected in his field because of his work to advance the state of antivirus research and in creating effective countermeasures.

Jeff had run a test of his solution before leaving Atlanta and it checked out. He’d then left the system to the IT staff while he flew home. He’d just spent the day remotely running additional tests, really for his own peace of mind. It all looked good, but as he’d tried to explain, this approach always left bits and pieces of the virus behind like so much clutter scattered across a factory floor or piled in corners. Generally that was no problem, but do it often enough and you slowly contaminated the operating system in subtle ways that adversely effected its efficiency and security. Well, they’d been warned.

In the quiet of his house he heard a car drive by, its tires splashing as it passed through standing water. Finished, Jeff disconnected from the Atlanta system, then opened his accounting spreadsheet to calculate the bill.

Daryl was away — again. Since the events of two years before when they’d nearly been killed obtaining the codes needed to partially counter the force of a cyber-attack on the West by Al Qaeda, they’d been a committed couple. She’d resigned as director of US-CERT Security Operations located at Arlington, Virginia, and joined him in his private IT security company, Red Zoya Systems LP. The name was a takeoff on the zero day applications that had made the Al Qaeda attack so frightening.

Though neither of their names had surfaced in the media after blunting the Al Qaeda attack, within certain circles they were superstars. Word of their exploits, both accurate and wildly exaggerated, had spread throughout the cyber-security industry. The result was more work than they could comfortably manage.

Their fees continued to pile up in the bank as neither of them had the time to spend their income. They worked out of their Georgetown Redstone town house, though; on any given day one or both of them were out of the city or country on a project. They stayed in touch remotely, but the work tended to be all-consuming. Partly it was their nature, but it was primarily the demands that came with the job. By the time they were summoned the situation was always critical.

One snowy Sunday Jeff had contemplated just how many days they’d spent apart. He’d pulled out his calendar and made a dismal discovery that only confirmed what he suspected. In the last eighteen months, since they’d been set up here and been fully available for work, he and Daryl had spent a grand total of twenty-three days together. And on most of those days one or both of them had worked. He did not include one frenzied three-month period when they had largely worked from the office together on a special project as there’d been little interaction between them except as related to the job at hand.

He’d pointed this out to Daryl while she’d hurriedly packed for her next trip and she’d assured him they’d do something about it, that she wanted to do something about it — just as soon as she got back. That had been three weeks ago.

Jeff finished the tabulation, saved the file, then locked the screen with a sigh. This was no way to run a relationship. He sometimes wondered why he even bothered. Given the reality of their situation, he could only see one outcome.

Just then his telephone rang. He glanced at the number as he answered. London calling.

6

Ahmed Hossein al-Rashid left class ahead of the pack, stepped outside the building, and drew a deep breath. The wind flowed down the Vltava River valley, bringing with it the floral fragrance of the countryside. It was spring but there was still a hint of lingering winter in the air. The other students streamed about him, laughing, talking, smoking. He pulled a pack of Marlboro cigarettes from his pocket, turned his back to the wind, then lit up with a Zippo lighter.

Thirty-eight years old that month, with olive skin, thick black hair and mustache, he was a physically fit man who worked to stay that way despite his love of American cigarettes.

He liked Prague. Though a European capital, with the narrow, winding streets of the Old City and the ornate coffee shops rich with their pungent aroma, it reminded him of home. Of course, in most ways it was very different. The Czechs were a cold people, not especially friendly to outsiders. No wonder the Slovaks had broken away at the first opportunity.

Prague was, for all its appeal, a superb example of the decline of the West. The Czechs had given up having children, for one. If it weren’t for immigrants like himself the population would be falling. Then who would there be to tax and pay for the lavish social programs and early retirement every Czech expected as a right of birth? And for all the churches that dotted the city, the Czechs were an atheist people — which in his view was even worse than the polytheism of most Westerners.

But his primary complaint was that he missed his own culture, the intimacy of his extended family. There were in Prague nearly 300,000 illegals. With a population of just over one million it was impossible to move about without spotting someone from another country. There were, however, no more than two hundred Iranians in the city and Ahmed spent little time among them. Many had a connection to the long-deposed Shah and his regime, and Ahmed had no wish to be involved with them or Iranian politics.

An attractive blue-eyed, blond Czech, a student in his class, smiled at Ahmed as she passed. He could not recall her name but would make a point to sit with her next time. Some of these Czech girls liked a fling with a darker-skinned, exotic man from the Middle East. He was glad to play his part, though he had to be careful Saliha didn’t find out. He needed to stay on her good side and she didn’t like his roving eye one bit. Their relationship had cooled in recent months, though she was no less possessive.

Ahmed set out for his apartment, which was in a less desirable, but cheaper, part of the city. Forty minutes later the concierge nodded as he entered his building. A fat man with beady eyes, he rarely shaved or bathed. Ahmed had heard he was Hungarian, though he suspected he was actually a gypsy. He mounted the narrow stairs two at a time to the third floor. He unlocked the door, entered, closed it behind him.

Tossing his backpack on the coach, he opened the netbook on the table in front of the room’s only window as he lit another cigarette. He checked for messages and there it was. He downloaded the attachment directly onto a new key-ring thumb drive, deleted the message, then for a few minutes scanned news from home.

Ahmed glanced at his watch, closed the netbook, then quickly made the bed. Saliha was due any minute and she hated dirty sheets, often sniffing at them as if she could detect the odor of another woman. Perhaps she could, if he’d be so foolish as to bring one here.

He’d just finished when he heard the door open.