CyberStorm (43 page)

The administrators at the hedge funds would have quickly figured it out, probably faster than the criminals would have been able to extract funds, and the Russians knew this. So to keep away as many staff as possible, they’d done two things—initiated the attack on Christmas Eve, and issued a false emergency alert about a bird flu outbreak.

The bird flu warning had been dramatically more successful in creating havoc than they’d intended, and like the power outage, it had cascaded through the system. Although they’d been successful in their campaign, they’d been too successful, turning themselves from mere criminals into terrorists.

The CIA was now hunting them down.

At the time, with the Chinese and American aircraft carriers squaring off in the South China Sea, it was impossible to understand the power outages in Connecticut, bird flu epidemic, and logistics attack as anything but a coordinated attack by the Chinese in retaliation to US forces threatening their “protectorate.”

When the Amtrak train had crashed, resulting in the loss of civilian life, US Cyber Command had initiated an attack on Chinese infrastructure in response. That was when things really went off the rails. Even then, the Chinese Politburo had issued a strict warning against retaliation since they knew they hadn’t attacked America first and were trying to figure out what was going on.

Although not admitted, the rumors leaked online were that the governor of Shanxi Province had instructed a splinter group of the PLA to initiate a rebuttal attack on US infrastructure after the initial US Cyber Command attack against China. It still wasn’t clear exactly what happened, but it looked like he may have also opened the floodgates from his own dam to wreck a village in an effort to justify his actions.

It was also understood that it had been this splinter group that had knocked out electrical generators and jammed up the water systems going into New York. Under normal conditions this would have caused major disruptions, but the deadly disaster that became CyberStorm was made all the more possible by its coinciding with one of the most intense series of winter storms to ever hit New England.

In the end, CyberStorm was a swirling, simultaneous collision of events in the cyber and physical domains. If it seemed a fantastic coincidence, it wasn’t. Millions of attacks a day occurred all over cyberspace, like waves rolling across a cyber ocean. Eventually, by simple laws of probability, a series of cyberattack waves had coalesced, the same way giant rogue waves were created in the real oceans that seemingly came from nowhere to wreak destruction.

I was standing in the waiting room, reading the endless analyses of what had happened, surrounded by reporters. They weren’t here for me—they were following Vince around. Vince had become the famous founder of the meshnet that had saved untold lives, helping maintain order when everything else had failed.

Millions of distress calls and messages had been logged on the meshnet, along with hundreds of thousands of images. People were now combing through this, searching for images of their loved ones, trying to find out what had happened in the chaos, and the authorities were using it to track down people who had committed crimes. The VinceNet, as they called it, was still operating.

Grabbing some change from my pocket, I popped it into the coffee machine and selected a latte.

Reporters.
They’d been half the problem, part of the reason why it had taken so long for the scale of the emergency to become understood.

With communications down and the storms grinding into the city, reporters on the outside hadn’t been able to get inside to see what was happening. Instead, CNN and others had stationed themselves in Queens and the outer boroughs, reporting on conditions there, but nobody understood what was happening deep inside Manhattan.

So the world heard reports that New York was experiencing difficulties, but with the impression that Manhattan was sleeping underneath its blanket of snow. The real disaster only became apparent when they quarantined the island “temporarily,” and the world had watched in horror as they saw people drowning and freezing to death as they tried to escape across the Hudson and East Rivers.

I picked up my latte, blowing on it to cool it down.

It was half natural disaster and half manmade disaster, but even there, the distinction wasn’t obvious. Some climatologists were loudly declaring that the physical storms were the result of the changing climate, so that really these were manmade storms just as much as the CyberStorm that had collided with them. And if everyone was to blame, was this the same as nobody being to blame?

“You okay, Mike?”

I looked up from my latte. It was Vince, surrounded by the reporters. He was standing next to an elderly lady.

“Yeah, just thinking.”

“I think we’re all thinking,” said the lady in a kind voice.

“Mike,” said Vince formally, “I’d like to introduce you to Patricia Killiam, my thesis advisor at MIT.”

I held out my hand. “A pleasure. Vince told me a lot about you.”

“Good things I hope?” she replied, smiling. I knew she was in her eighties, yet she barely looked sixty. “Congratulations on your new baby daughter.”

“Thank you.”

She was still holding my hand.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Vince, “but Patricia was here for a day, and I wanted to introduce the two of you.”

“I heard about how you used augmented reality during the New York episode,” said Patricia. “Fascinating.”

I laughed. “That was more Vince.”

“I’d like to talk sometime, if you’d be interested.”

“I’d like that.”

She had such a kind, warm smile that it was impossible to consider refusing her.

“But maybe a bit later?”

She laughed. “I’d love to see Antonia, if you’d allow me the honor.”

I smiled back at her and nodded toward the hallway.

“It would be my pleasure.”

July
4

“DO YOU WANT to go see Uncle Vince?” I cooed at Antonia.

She stared at me and stuck a few fingers in her mouth.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

I laughed, picking her up to wrap her in the baby sling hanging on my front. She was so tiny, and this would be her first walk outside, the first time she would see New York, and I wanted it to be special. We were going to walk up to Central Park, to see the Fourth of July festivities.

Our apartment was filled with packing boxes, and with Antonia safely stowed, I paused, taking a moment to say good-bye.

Power and water had been returned to our area within a few days of us leaving for Virginia. There had already been water when we left, but the pipes into our building had burst. We should have stayed, but then they’d been saying services would be restored every day of the disaster. There was no way of knowing that it would actually happen, until it did.

Temperatures had started rising even before we’d left, and by the time we returned to New York in the first week of March, they’d had power and services for six weeks, all the snow was gone, and New York was scrubbed clean.

It was almost as if it had never happened.

Most of the people in our building had managed to get away before the siege of New York began. They’d returned to what looked like a war zone, but very quickly the garbage had been collected, doors and windows fixed, and fresh coats of paint applied.

There was almost a manic urgency to push the episode into the past. Lauren’s family, desperately wondering where we were, had even contracted someone to clean our place and the hallway. When we returned, everything was back to how it was before.

Everything, that was, except Tony.

I sighed, taking one last look. The movers would be taking our stuff up to our new place on the Upper West Side. Closing the door behind me, I knocked on the Borodins’ door.

“Ah, Mih-kah-yal, An-ton-ia,” said Irena warmly, opening the door. Aleksandr had the TV on, but he wasn’t asleep. He nodded toward me, smiling, and I waved back. “You come in to eat?”

“Another time,” I promised. “I just wanted to say good-bye, to thank you again.”

They’d held Paul’s gang until Sergeant Williams had taken them. Like everyone else, the prisoners had nearly starved, but they’d been no worse for wear than that.

The Borodins seemed almost unaffected, as if they couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about, but then they’d lived through something even more horrific. In the siege of Leningrad, the city’s population of four million had been reduced to less than half a million over an event that lasted 787 days, where this one had lasted a mere thirty-six. Over two million had died during Leningrad, where only seventy thousand had died here.

Only seventy thousand.

Still, it could have been so much worse.

“We will see you, yes? We will come up to see Antonia and Luke,” said Irena, leaning forward on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek and giving Antonia a tiny kiss on her bare, pink head as well.

“Anytime,” I replied.

We stood and stared at each other for a moment, and then she nodded and returned to her cooking, leaving the door ajar. I turned and continued down the hallway.

The hallway.

In my mind’s eye, I could still see the couches and chairs lining it, crowded with people under blankets. The most powerful memory was the smell. The carpets had been torn out, the wallpaper replaced, but I could still smell it. Even so, it had been our sanctuary, and a part of me warmly remembered the days we’d spent huddled together, sharing our fears and crumbs of food.

Pam and Rory had survived; in fact, everyone who was there when we left had been fine. We’d visited Pam and Rory, but we hadn’t spoken about the blood. It wasn’t necessary. In a strange way, they’d remained as true to their vegan sensibilities as they could have—the blood was donated willingly, and they hadn’t harmed anyone.

The only one we didn’t speak to was Sarah. She was gone by the time we got back.

Sergeant Williams had made it his personal mission to catch up with Paul, whose case had become a multiple-homicide investigation based on evidence from images collected on Vince’s laptop. When they caught him, the full story had come out. While Richard came from money, he’d been in debt, so he’d started an identity theft scheme with Stan and Paul, targeting out-of-town businessmen who used their limo service. Nobody asked us where Richard was, and he became just another one of the thousands of missing.

Richard had been the one who had stolen Lauren’s identity, which was also probably the reason he had been so keen to cozy up to her parents, to angle for their information. It had all spun out of control when the disaster had started. Paul had threatened Richard, saying he was going to tell them what he’d been doing if Richard wouldn’t help him steal supplies.

From there it was all downhill. We suspected the deaths of the nine people on the second floor weren’t as innocent as he’d made it out to be, but all we could do was speculate.

Reaching the elevators, I went to push the down button, but then stopped myself and made for the emergency exit down. The familiar sounds of echoing footsteps on the metal stairs filled my ears as I descended. Down in the lobby, the manicured Japanese gardens were back with the flowing fountains. Instead of going out the front, I continued out the back.

Outside I was greeted by a blast of warm air and the hum of New York. A jackhammer chattered in the distance, joined by a cacophony of honking cars and a helicopter flying overhead. Looking toward the Hudson, I saw the top of a sailboat pass by.

Life had returned to normal.

Walking along Twenty-Fourth, I crossed Ninth Avenue, and I looked downtown toward the Financial District. The Russian criminals had been targeting only the hedge funds in Connecticut, but they had nearly brought down the entire system. Amazingly, once power was back up and the networks cleaned, it had all started back up again.

The row of buildings that had burnt down was already demolished, with scaffolding going up for new buildings to replace them.

They were calculating the cost of CyberStorm into the hundreds of billions of dollars, dwarfing any previous disaster in US history, and that didn’t include the tens of billions of dollars of lost revenue and costs to clean the networks and internet. But the biggest cost was in human lives. At over seventy thousand and rising, it was a costlier conflict than the Vietnam War, if that classification made any sense.

The media, however, was already making comparisons to wars and other climate disasters, like the heat wave in Europe in 2003 that had killed seventy thousand people—in Paris they’d had to open refrigerated warehouses to start storing the dead when morgues had overflowed. I remembered reading about it, a few lines of text I’d skimmed one morning with my coffee before getting on with my day. Now people all over the world were doing the same about what had happened in New York, a few lines of text in the daily news cycle until the next disaster hit.

Reaching the corner of Eighth Avenue, I turned north and checked my phone.
Ten after two.
I was supposed to be meeting Vince and Lauren at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park at three o’clock. Enough time to enjoy a stroll up there.

Starting uptown, I walked a few more blocks and soon passed Madison Square Garden. It was closed and would probably never reopen, but it was crowded with people. The block was surrounded by an enormous memorial of flowers, piling out into the street, with photos and letters affixed to the walls.

Like a cyber version of the flowers and pictures around Madison Square Garden, Vince and his followers had created a website where the hundreds of thousands of images collected from people taking pictures with their cell phones had been organized. Loved ones were getting closure, even connecting with people who had taken the pictures to discuss and find out what happened. Thousands more people were being brought to justice for crimes, with witnesses contacted through their meshnet accounts. Rows of FEMA trucks still occupied the block around the makeshift memorial.