CyberStorm (6 page)

“What’s going on?” I muttered aloud. It wasn’t like New Yorkers to start stealing.

“It’s the news, sir, the Chinese,” replied the cashier.

“What news?”

“That aircraft carrier thing,” was all she could add, but by that point I was already pushing my way toward the door, suddenly and irrationally fearful for Luke.

2:45 p
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m
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“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me before?”

I was pacing back and forth in front of the huge flat-panel TV that dominated one wall of Chuck’s apartment.

“I figured you’d just think it was me being paranoid,” replied Chuck. Blurry images of a smoking aircraft carrier filled the screen behind me.

I’d returned to the Borodins’ in a rush and knocked loudly on their door. While walking the few blocks up from Whole Foods I’d searched the news on my smartphone. It’d taken forever to respond.

There’d been an incident in the South China Sea. A Chinese warplane had crashed. The Chinese were claiming it was an attack by the Americans, but the American forces were denying anything to do with it, saying it was an accident. The governor of Shanxi Province, in northern China, was all over the news claiming it was an act of war.

Luke was fine when I arrived, but his fever had gotten worse. He was sweating profusely, and Irena explained to me that he’d been crying most of time I’d been gone. I’d left him at the Borodins’, letting him rest, and gone over to Chuck’s.

“You didn’t think that this was maybe something important to share?” I asked incredulously.

“Not at the time I didn’t.”

CNN was on again in the background
. “Sources in the Pentagon deny any responsibility for the crashed Chinese warplane, saying that it was the result of the inexperience of Chinese forces in operating at-sea carrier operations—”

“You haven’t had any food deliveries to your restaurants in a week and you didn’t think I might be interested?”

“—Poison Trojan has now infected DNS servers worldwide. The Chinese are denying responsibility, but the bigger issue now is the Scramble virus that has infected logistics systems—”

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” replied Chuck. “We have computer problems all the time.”

The virus that had shut down FedEx and UPS had shifted gears to infect almost every other commercial shipping software, grinding the world’s supply chain to a halt.

“I’ve been reading the hacker message boards,” added Chuck helpfully. “They’re saying that UPS and FedEx are proprietary systems, and that the speed of the virus means it must have hundreds of unique ‘zero-days’ in it.”

“What’s a ‘zero-day’?” asked Susie.

She was sitting on the couch next to Chuck, holding tightly onto Ellarose, whose head bobbled up and down as she watched me pacing in circles like a caged tiger. Susie was a real Southern Belle, a brunette with long, silky hair, sun-kissed freckles, and a slim figure, but her pretty brown eyes were now filled with concern.

“It’s a new virus, right?” Chuck ventured, looking toward me.

I wasn’t a security expert, but I was an electrical engineer and computer networks were my field of expertise. Just the day before I’d been having a conversation with a colleague in the security field about this topic.

“Sort of,” I explained. “A ‘zero-day’ is a software vulnerability that isn’t yet documented. A ‘zero-day’ attack is one that uses one of these previously unknown weaknesses in a system. It’s an attack that has had zero days to be analyzed yet.”

Any system had weaknesses. The ones that were “known” usually had patches or fixes, and the list of new “known” vulnerabilities expanded at the rate of hundreds per week for the thousands of commercial software vendors in the world.

With a typical Fortune 500 company using thousands of individual software programs, the list of vulnerabilities often hovered in the tens of thousands at any given moment. It was an impossible game of catch-up against an adversary that only needed one hole to remain open among literally millions that an organization had to continually fix.

While everyone, private or government, struggled to keep up even with the list of known vulnerabilities, against “unknown” vulnerabilities, or “zero-days,” the situation was even worse. They had nearly no defense, precisely because the attack vectors were, by definition, unknown.

They both stared at me blankly.

“It means an attack that we have no defense against.”

Stuxnet, the virus that had taken down the Iranian nuclear processing plants, had used about ten zero-days to get inside the systems it attacked. It was one of the first public examples of a new breed of sophisticated cyberweapons. They cost a lot of time and money to build, so someone wouldn’t be unleashing these ones without some purpose in mind.

“What do you mean, attacks that we have no defense against?” asked Susie. “How many of these are there? Can’t the government stop it?”

“The government mostly looks to the private sector to protect this stuff,” I replied. “And nobody has any idea of all the ways we could be attacked.”

CNN had switched to a discussion between four commentators and analysts
. “The thing that has me worried, Roger, is that computer viruses, especially sophisticated ones like this, are usually designed to infiltrate networks to get information out. These don’t seem to be doing that. They’re just bringing the computer systems down.”

“What does that mean?” asked Susie, staring at the TV screen.

As if answering her question, the analyst looked straight into the camera and said slowly,
“The only thing I can assume is that we’re being purposely attacked, with the only goal of inflicting as much damage as possible.”

Susie brought one hand up to cover her mouth. Saying nothing, I sat down next to them and tried calling Lauren again for the dozenth time.

Where is she?

5:30 p
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m
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“I’M SORRY.”

Lauren was holding tightly onto Luke. When we’d retrieved him from the Borodins’, he was crying in great wailing sobs. I’d tried feeding him, but he didn’t want anything. His forehead was burning up.

“Sorry doesn’t quite cut it,” I complained. “Come on, give Luke back to me. I’ll try feeding him again.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” said Lauren quietly, speaking to Luke and not me. She held onto him fiercely, shaking her head and not giving him up. Her face was flushed bright red from the cold outside, her hair a tangled mess.

“Why the hell didn’t you answer my texts for four hours?”

We were back in our own apartment. Lauren was sitting on our leather loveseat across from me on our couch. It was dark outside. I’d spent the whole afternoon trying to get in touch with Lauren, but she’d been totally unreachable. At half past five she’d suddenly shown up at Chuck’s door, asking questions about what was going on, asking where Luke was.

“I had my cell off. I forgot.”

I avoided asking what she’d been doing.

“And you didn’t notice all this was going on?”

“No, Mike, I didn’t. The whole world isn’t attached to CNN. When I found out I rushed straight home, but there were no taxis and the Two and Three lines weren’t working, so I had to walk twenty blocks in the freezing cold,” she said defensively. “Have you ever tried running in high heels?”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Everyone’s nerves were on edge, and it wasn’t any use fighting. Sighing, I relaxed.

“Why don’t you try feeding him?” I said, my voice softening. “Maybe if mommy tries feeding him he’ll eat?”

Luke had stopped crying and was sniffling, his face covered in snot. Picking up a wet wipe from a plastic container on our coffee table, I got up and reached over to try and clean his face. He fussed and moved his head back and forth, leaning back out of my reach.

“He really is burning up,” said Lauren, peering into his face and putting a hand to his forehead.

“Just a little winter cold,” I said reassuringly. He looked unhappy, but not that bad.

My cell phone pinged a text message. Lauren’s phone chirped as well, and through the open doorway to our apartment I could hear Chuck’s and Susie’s phones too. Frowning, I pulled my phone from my pocket and swiped the code to open it, clicking open the new text message.

“Health Advisory Warning – Widespread infection bird flu H5N1 New York Connecticut. Highly pathogenic. Advise public stay indoors, emergency closure Fairfield County Manhattan Financial District outlying areas.”

It was from the NY-ALERT emergency notification service that Chuck had joined us up to.

“What is it?”

Reading and rereading the message, I looked up in horror, watching Lauren wiping more snot away from Luke’s face with her bare hand, wetly kissing his bare cheek. I remembered taking Luke out to meet all my clients in the days before. My mind filled with images of him getting kisses from people in Chinatown, Little Italy, all over the place. And then there was that Chinese family down the hall whose parents had just arrived from the mainland.
Did I expose him to something?

“What?” asked Lauren, her voice rising in alarm as she looked at my face.

“Honey, put Luke down for a second and go wash your hands.”

The words coming out of my mouth sounded alien, like they were coming from some foreign being. My mind raced while my heart pounded in my chest.
It’s just a false alarm, it’s just a cold.
The irrational fear I’d felt running back from Whole Foods flooded my veins again.

“What do you mean, put Luke down?” demanded Lauren.

She could sense my fear.

“Mike! What are you talking about? What was in that message?”

Chuck appeared in our doorway, and Lauren looked up at him. I’d crossed over to Luke and Lauren by then, holding a blanket I’d picked up off the couch, and I was wrapping it around Luke, gently trying to take him from her.

“It’s just a precaution,” said Chuck softly, advancing slowly into the room with his hands held out in front of him. “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. We don’t know what’s happening.”

“What don’t you know is happening?”

Lauren looked up into my eyes and, trusting but not understanding, released Luke to me.

“Report of a bird flu outbreak,” I said quietly.

“WHAT?”

“We haven’t heard anything on the news—” Chuck started to say, and just then we heard the TV announcer’s voice floating in from their apartment next door.
“Breaking news—reports of an outbreak of bird flu virus have just been reported from Connecticut area hospitals—”

“Give Luke back to me!” said Lauren sharply, standing and taking him out of my arms.

I didn’t resist. She glared at me, and I guiltily shrank back.

“He’s right, Lauren,” said Chuck, continuing to approach to her. “I’m sure this is nothing, but this isn’t just about you or him. We’re all at risk.”

“Then stay away from us!”

She turned to me accusingly.

“So that was your first reaction? To quarantine your infant son?”

“—CDC in Atlanta cannot confirm or deny the outbreak, saying that they don’t know where the warning originated but that local emergency workers—”

“That’s not what I was doing. I was worried about you,” I tried to explain, waving the blanket around in the air. “I don’t know, what’s the proper reaction when a deadly virus is announced?”

Lauren was about to unload a return salvo when Susie appeared behind Chuck. She was cradling Ellarose in one arm and holding out the other one, waving it back and forth to get our attention.

“Keep calm, y’all. This ain’t no time for fighting with each other. I know it’s been tough between you two lately, but that’s gotta stop.”

Susie walked into the middle of the room, holding her hand up high, palm outwards.

“Susie, I think you should take Ellarose back into—”

“No, no,” she objected, waving her hand around. “If it’s done it’s done, and we’re all in this together.”

Ellarose saw Luke and squeaked and smiled. Luke, puffy and congested, looked over at her and attempted a grin in return.

“Let’s not go making mountains out of molehills,” continued Susie. “Luke’s got a little cold is all. This is a strange day, so let’s all calm down.”

With her steady words, the tension began to evaporate.

“How about I just take Luke down to emergency to make sure,” I said after a pause. “He is sick, and I don’t mind going.” I smiled at Lauren. “Just to be sure.”

“Wait a minute, that could be about the worst thing to do,” objected Chuck. “Hospitals are the worst place to be if there’s really an outbreak.”

“But what if he is infected?” I replied, my voice on edge. “I need to know, no matter what, get him taken care of.”

“We’ll go together,” said Lauren quietly, returning the smallest of smiles.

“I’ll go and get some masks from downstairs,” said Chuck. “You should at least wear masks.”

Susie gave him an evil look.

“I’m being practical. Bird flu is twice as deadly as bubonic plague.”

“What’s wrong with you?” said Susie, exasperated.

“It’s a good idea,” agreed Lauren, gripping Luke tightly. “Go get the masks.”

7
:00 p
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m
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CHUCK WENT DOWNSTAIRS to raid his storage locker while we moved back into their place and watched CNN. He came back up loaded down with hockey bags stuffed with equipment and supplies.

After setting it all down in the middle of the room, he fished around, pulling out bags of freeze-dried food and camping equipment before finding the medical masks. They looked like the ones you’d wear if you were spray-painting something. He handed them out to us and then went out to distribute some to all the neighbors.

Chuck tried to get us to wear latex gloves, but Lauren refused, and I refused as well. The idea of holding our infant son in them, protecting ourselves by wearing rubber gloves like he was some kind of pariah, was too much to seriously consider. If he was sick from whatever they were talking about on the news, we were already infected, so there was no sense in it. Wearing the masks was more to protect other people around us.