CyberStorm (4 page)

“So where are you going today?” I asked.

“—projecting hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue for this holiday season, driving the economy even further into recession—”

“Meeting some headhunters downtown. Starting some dialogues to see if any low-hanging fruit comes loose.”

I forced an encouraging smile. “That’s great, honey.”

How was it that I’d had to start to lie to her about how I felt?

She’d become withdrawn ever since coming back from Boston, keeping her distance from me. I was trying to give her space, letting her go through whatever process she had to go through, but it felt like I was losing her. I was behaving as if I didn’t care, when every fiber inside me wanted to reach out to her and shake her and ask what the hell was happening.

She sighed, glancing toward the TV and then looking back at me. I met her gaze but then dropped my eyes, giving her that space. Lauren continued to look at me and then leaned down to give Luke a kiss, whispering something in his ear. Quickly, she picked up her laptop and made for the door.

“I’ll be back just after lunch,” she called over her shoulder.

“See you then,” I replied softly to an already closing door.

She didn’t even give me a kiss.

I cut up the last pieces of a peach and handed them to Luke. With a naughty grin he grabbed the fruit from me and then squealed with glee as he threw it onto the floor for an appreciative Gorby. For good measure, one of the chunks flew off and landed on the report I was trying to read.

I smiled and wiped off the peach.

“Done with breakfast? Want to play with Ellarose?”

Picking up a napkin, I reached down to wipe his face and then gently lifted him up out of his highchair to deposit him on the ground. He stood unsteadily for a moment, holding onto the legs of my barstool for balance, before rocketing off toward Ellarose in the wobbling-on-the-edge-of-disaster run he’d been working on. Reaching out, he caught onto the front of the couch, stopping himself like an unsteady ice skater.

He looked down at Ellarose and then up at me with a big smile.

Ellarose, for her part, hadn’t yet mastered the art of turning onto her stomach. She was only six months old and was lying on her back on her play mat, looking up at Luke with wide eyes. Luke squeaked and plopped down onto his knees to crawl over to her, putting a hand onto her face.

“Careful, Luke, be gentle,” I warned.

He looked into Ellarose’s eyes and then sat upright next to her, protectively, and looked at the TV.

“The extent of the bird flu outbreak within China is still unclear, but the US State Department has now issued a travel advisory warning against all regions. Combined with a growing anti-China boycotting movement—”

“Crazy world, huh?” I said to Luke, watching him watch the TV. Gorby walked over to curl up behind him.

Returning to my work, I continued reading a report on the potential market for augmented reality on the internet. I’d just been sent a pair of new augmented reality glasses by one of the big tech companies. It was a technology that fascinated me, and I wanted to get involved in a start-up, but Lauren said it was too risky.

After an hour or so of reading and doing my expenses, I noticed Luke was being awfully quiet. He’d fallen asleep against Gorby.

I yawned.

A nap seemed like a great idea, so I quietly walked over and picked up Ellarose to deposit her in her pack ‘n play by the window. Reaching down, I picked up Luke, his sleepy head lolling around like a sack of potatoes, and laid down on the couch, cradling my son on my stomach as I drifted off to sleep.

CNN droned on in the background as I dropped off.
“At what point does cyberespionage become cyberattack? With more on this we go to our correspondent...”

§

A loud banging on the door woke me up. My brain slowly awoke out of its fog, and then there was the banging again.

“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blooow your door down!”

Luke had drooled all over my T-shirt. My muscles were sluggish from sleep.
How long was I out?
I groaned as I struggled to sit up, carefully holding onto Luke.

“Yeah, yeah, just a sec,” I called out.

Holding Luke in one arm, I got up and ambled toward the door and unlocked it. Chuck burst through holding brown paper bags in both hands.

“Anyone for lunch?” he announced enthusiastically, proceeding to the kitchen counter where he began unpacking.

Luke watched Chuck with half-open eyes. I crossed over to the couch and laid him down, covering him up with a blanket, and then returned to Chuck. By then he’d emptied everything out onto plates.

“Is it lunchtime already?” I asked, rubbing my eyes and stretching. “I was conked out.” I yawned. “What is that?”

“Foie gras and French fries, my friend,” said Chuck with a smile, waving a baguette around in the air like a magic wand, “and some Creole shrimp in butter dipping sauce.”

It was no wonder I was getting fat.

“I can feel my arteries hardening already,” I joked.

Reaching around the counter, I slid open a drawer to pull out two forks and handed him one while I dug into the French fries with the other.

“No restaurant stuff this time of year?”

“This is the busiest time of the year,” laughed Chuck, picking up a meaty chunk of foie gras from atop the French fries. “But I got stuff to do here.”

“More stuff for your doomsday locker?”

He smiled and stuffed the fatty liver into his mouth.

I shook my head. “Do you
really
believe it’s all going to come apart?”

Chuck wiped his greasy lips with the side of one hand. “You
really
believe it never will?”

“People are always saying the world is ending, but it never does. Society is too far advanced.”

“Tell that to the Easter Islanders and Anasazi Indians.”

“Those were isolated.”

“What about the Romans, then? And tell me we’re not isolated on this speck of blue called Earth?”

Picking up a shrimp, I began shelling it.

“I’ve been researching the cyber world, at
your
suggestion,” said Chuck, “and you’re right.”

I regretted I’d said anything.

“What’s happening now,” Chuck whispered conspiratorially, “it makes the Cold War look like an age of transparency and understanding.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“For nearly all human history, the ability of one country to affect another was based on control of physical territory. Guess what broke that link for the first time?”

“Cyber?” I guessed. Popping the shrimp into my mouth, the rich texture of Cajun spices and butter exploded into my senses.
Oh, that’s good.

“Nope. Space systems. Ever since Sputnik launched in 1957, outer space has been the military high-ground, to gather information and project power globally.”

“What does that have to do with cyber?”

“Because cyber is the second thing that broke that link. It’s replacing space as the
new
military high-ground, and for exactly the same reasons—gathering information and influencing events anywhere on the planet.”

I thought about that for a moment.

Chuck stuffed a mouthful of greasy fries into his mouth. “And outer space is already a
part
of cyberspace.” He smiled.

“What do you mean?”

“Most space systems are internet-based. To us, things in space look far away, but in cyberspace, there’s no difference.”

“So what is the difference, then?”

“The big difference is that while
space
requires a massive amount of money, all that you need to get into
cyber
space is a laptop.”

Switching from the shrimp to the fries, I hunted for my own chunk of foie gras. “So that has you worried?”

He shook his head. “What’s got me worried are those logic bombs in the energy grid you talked about. The Chinese wanted us to find them, so we’d know they could do it. Otherwise, we’d never have spotted them.”

“So you’re saying the CIA, NSA, all those three-letter agencies you love to hate, none of them would have seen it?” I said skeptically.

He shook his head. “People have this image of cyberwar, and they think of videogames and everything being squeaky clean, but it won’t be like that.”

“So what will it be like?”

“In 1982 the CIA rigged a logic bomb that blew up a Siberian pipeline—it created an explosion of three kilotons, as much as a small nuclear device. All they did was alter some code from a Canadian company that controlled it, and that was more than thirty years ago. You should see what they can do now.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“The new cyberweapons of mass destruction they’re building, nobody’s ever tested them,” continued Chuck, his smile gone. “At least with nuclear weapons you know they’re scary—Hiroshima, Bikini—but with cyber, nobody knows how much damage they’ll cause if they let them loose, and they’re merrily sticking them into each others’ infrastructure like candy canes on a doomsday Christmas tree.”

“You really think it’s that bad?”

“Do you know that when they set off the atomic bomb for the first time, during the Manhattan Project, the physicists running the show had a bet going whether it would ignite the atmosphere?”

I shook my head.

“Their best guess was fifty-fifty that they’d destroy all life on the planet, but they went ahead anyway. Government planning hasn’t changed, my friend. They have no idea what these new weapons they’re building might do.”

“So there’s nowhere to run anymore if things go wrong anyway, is that what you’re saying?” I countered. “If it goes down, do you really want to be around to struggle and watch everyone die? I’d prefer a nice quick exit.”

“You’re being awfully casual.” He looked at Luke on the couch. “You wouldn’t fight with everything you’ve got, till your last breath, to protect him?”

I looked at Luke. He was right. I nodded slowly, conceding the point.

“You have too much faith in things always moving forward,” he declared. “Since humans began making stuff, we’ve lost more technologies than we’ve gained. Society goes backwards from time to time.”

“I’m sure you have some examples.” There was no use in trying to slow him down when he was on a roll.

“On a dig in Pompeii, they found aqueduct technology better than what we’re using today.” Chuck dug into the pile of French fries and pulled out another glistening chunk of foie gras. “And how they built the pyramids is still lost tech.”

“So now we’re talking ancient spacemen?”

“I’m being serious. When Admiral Zheng pulled his fleet out of Suzhou in China in 1405, he had ships the size of modern aircraft carriers and took nearly thirty thousand troops with him.”

“Really?”

“Look it up,” he said. “Zheng was in contact with our West Coast Indians four hundred years before Lewis and Clark brought Pocahontas on holiday there. The Chinese were smoking reefers with the Oregon chiefs on ships bigger than modern battle cruisers a hundred years before Columbus ‘discovered’ America. Know how big Columbus’s famous
Niña
was?”

I shrugged.

“Fifty feet, and he had maybe fifty guys with him.”

“Didn’t he have three boats?”

“My point is that before we’d even managed to paddle out of Europe in little buckets, China was already sailing the globe with thirty thousand troops on fleets of aircraft-carrier-sized warships.”

We’d stopped eating by then.

“What’s your point? I’m not following.”

“Just that society goes backwards sometimes, and all this stuff with China—I get the feeling we’re fooling ourselves.”

“They’re not the enemy?”

“Just the wrong perspective,” he explained. “We’re squaring them up to
be
the enemy, but mostly because
we
need an enemy. They’re not trying to control the world. That was never their goal, even when they were unimaginably more powerful than us.”

“So you’re saying you’re wrong about the cyber threat?”

“No, but—”

Chuck picked up another shrimp.

“But what?”

“Maybe we’re blinding ourselves to the real enemy.”

“What enemy is that, my conspiracy-loving friend?” I asked, rolling my eyes, expecting some rhetoric about the CIA or NSA.

Chuck finished shelling his shrimp and pointed it at me.

“Fear. Fear is the real enemy,” he said thoughtfully, looking toward the ceiling. After a moment he added, “Fear and ignorance.”

I laughed. “With all this stuff you’re stockpiling, aren’t
you
the one that’s afraid?”

“Not afraid,” he said deliberately, looking down from the ceiling to stare into my eyes. “Prepared.”

D
ay 1 - December 23

8:55 a
.
m
.

“IT’S TWO DAYS before Christmas. Isn’t it time to give it a rest?”

Lauren looked at me and shrugged. “I have to make this meeting. Richard really went out on a limb to get this guy to talk to me.”

We had the bedroom door shut, but the screech of Luke crying through the baby monitor on the kitchen counter cut her short. She reached down and shut it off, just like she’d been shutting me off for the past month.

I threw my hands in the air. “Well, if Richard set it up, then of course, abandon your family for another day.”

“Don’t get started,” she replied angrily, shaking her head. “At least Richard’s trying to help me.”

Closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, I mentally began to count to ten. It
was
almost Christmas, and there was no sense in escalating. I ran a hand through my hair while Lauren stood and stared at me.

I sighed.

“I don’t think Luke’s feeling well,” I said slowly. “We need to go food shopping for the holidays, and like I said, I need to finish delivering those client gifts.”

My new administrative assistant had forgotten to deliver a dozen of the personalized gifts that we’d created for our clients.