The Leviathan Effect (2 page)

Blaine’s interests ran more to foreign affairs than natural disasters, but she understood that visiting flood sites went with the territory. A week earlier, she had taken a similar tour of flooded regions in rural Kentucky. In between, there had been a border inspection in Arizona, a speech to the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Seattle, and a meeting with the US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner in Wyoming—which, during an interview with a local reporter, Blaine had mistakenly called Montana.

She gazed up now and saw the name of the town they were entering whoosh by:
BENDERVILLE
.

Ahead, the patchy, potholed road flattened out among the wet trees. Travel fatigue was setting in again, and Blaine was anxious to return to Washington.

“We
are
in Montana, right?” Jamie Griffith deadpanned, still looking at his laptop screen.

Blaine smiled. She had made it clear that humor was welcome in her administration, even when it was at her expense. She was in good company, anyway: in 1982, President Reagan had famously raised his glass at a banquet in Brazil and toasted “the people of Bolivia.”

“Did I tell you Kevin and I are finally getting away this weekend?” she said.

“Mmmm. Not the details,” Jamie said.

Blaine listened to her staffers’ fingers typing on their keypads, the windshield wipers slow-thumping back and forth.

“Just a mother-son bonding thing. Planning to spend a couple days on the Shore. Biking, kayaking. Crab cakes.”

Jamie made a grunting sound but didn’t look up. Blaine decided to just enjoy the scenery for a few minutes, reminding herself that her chief of staff had served her well over these past seven months. In fact, Jamie Griffith and Catherine Blaine had become a surprisingly effective team, even if they struck people as the odd couple: Blaine, tall and fit with dark blonde hair, green eyes, and strong classical features; Jamie, a couple of inches shorter, pasty skinned, paunchy, and perpetually disheveled. But, in fact, they weren’t what they seemed—Blaine, who gave off an air of order and efficiency, could be scattered and impulsive, while Jamie was methodical and meticulous. Griffith was a family man with two young children; Blaine, the mother of a nineteen-year-old, had occasionally struggled with the responsibilities of parenthood.

As the limousine rolled through the gates of the tiny airport, Jamie closed his laptop and surveyed the small crowd in the parking lot—about as many media people and town officials as onlookers.

A beat-up, lopsided lectern had been set up on an edge of the airfield. A half dozen public works crew members were lined up to the left side of the lectern, all wearing their orange municipal rain slickers. Behind the lectern was a C-20F Gulfstream twelve-seat executive transport plane, waiting to ferry them back to Reagan National.

Jamie stepped out first and walked interference, holding out his arms to keep back a female reporter who rushed over shouting “Secretary Blaine! Secretary Blaine!”

Blaine stopped at the lectern, leaning down to speak into the microphone, which seemed to have been set for someone four feet tall. “I’d like to commend all of the local agencies for the first-rate job you’ve done in dealing with this disaster. We’ve had a productive tour of the flooded areas, and I have assured the governor that we are fully committed to providing the necessary federal aid, including individual assistance and housing assistance.”

She then delivered a brief message from the President and took three questions from the local media. Washington had become more diligent about its response to natural disasters ever since the chorus
of criticism following Katrina in 2005; Catherine Blaine had been asked by the President to stress the government’s “commitment” to these West Virginia flood victims and she wanted to leave them with a sense of assurance that Washington would be there for them. But Blaine was thinking already about her next day’s appointments. They traveled to Ohio in the morning for a meeting on levee recertification. Then back to D.C. for a luncheon at the State Department and an afternoon briefing with the President.

As she walked out to the plane, Catherine Blaine heard a frantic clacking of heels on the wet pavement behind her.

“Secretary Blaine? Secretary Blaine! Could I get a quick comment from you before you go?”

Her chief of staff quickly stepped between them, but Blaine stopped him. “It’s all right, Jamie,” she said, summoning a smile for the reporter.

It wasn’t one of the locals, though. It was a reporter she recognized—a Washington correspondent named Melanie Cross, who wrote for the
Wall Street Review
.

The reporter took a moment to catch her breath.

“Do you have any comment, Secretary Blaine, on the reports coming out of Washington this afternoon about the security breaches?”

“The—?” Blaine studied the reporter’s face as she repeated her question, pen poised above her notepad. An intense woman with thick dark hair, smooth, lightly freckled skin, big doe eyes. “Which reports are these now?”

“The AP is quoting intelligence sources. Saying there have been unprecedented security breaches at CIA, Department of Defense, State Department and the White House.” She paused again to catch her breath, watching Blaine. “Do you have any comment?”

Blaine frowned, and glanced at Jamie, who was standing at the base of the steps to the Gulfstream. She
had
been briefed on several cyber security breaches in recent days, but they hadn’t been “unprecedented”—and it wasn’t something that should be known by the media.

“Is that the word they’re using—‘unprecedented?’ ”

“Yes. That’s—” She looked again at her notepad and what seemed to be a crumpled printout of a news story. “—and I quote, um, ‘one security source characterized them as potentially the most serious cyber threats the government has ever faced.’ ”

Blaine shook her head. “No,” she said. “I couldn’t comment on that.” She gazed at the printout in the reporter’s hand, which fluttered in the wet breeze. “Is that the story? Could I have a look?”

Instead of showing it to her, though, Melanie Cross continued to read, her damp hair falling over her face. “ ‘Unprecedented cyber breaches at Department of Defense and the State Department.’ Um, let’s see, ‘renewing fears that the country may be vulnerable to an attack that could paralyze power grids across America.’ ”

Blaine shook her head. In fact, every day foreign intelligence services tried to hack into US government websites and computer networks.

“I don’t think our power grids are all that vulnerable,” she said. “I think that’s been overplayed. But, again, I’m not able to comment on your specific question.”

Jamie cleared his throat loudly and Catherine Blaine turned toward the plane, as if noticing it for the first time. It was beginning to drizzle again, chilling the air.

“So are you saying then that you have
no know
ledge of these breaches?”

Blaine smiled, feeling a momentary exasperation at this leading question. A brief biography flashed up—Melanie Cross: business and tech reporter, who had helped break a story about illegal pharmaceutical networks in Africa; her boyfriend was, or had been, Jon Mallory, investigative reporter for the
Weekly American
magazine.

“My immediate concern today,” she said, “is the flooding here and these good people of West Virginia who are suffering.”

“Mmm hmm.” Melanie Cross pretended to scribble something in her notepad. Jamie widened his eyes.

“Walk with me to the plane, if you’d like,” Blaine said.

“Okay.”

They moved toward the Gulfstream, the reporter walking sideways, half a step ahead.

“Off the record? I am aware that there have been some breaches in the past couple of weeks,” she said. “But if there is a comment, it would need to come out of the White House. As you know, our cyber command operation is based at Fort Meade and we now have a cyber security coordinator at the White House. A so-called cyber czar.”

“Yes. And how do you feel about
that
?”

“About what?”

“Cyber command. Appointing a cyber czar.”

“Oh.”
Clever reporter
. “Well, that’s another story, isn’t it?”

Melanie Cross stopped walking and tilted her head, pen poised again. For years, there had been a philosophical tug of war between Homeland Security and the military over which should take the lead on cyber security issues. During her tenure in Congress, Blaine had spoken out against what she considered wasteful duplications of efforts.

When she said nothing else, Melanie Cross prompted, “Off the record?”

“Off the record, I think cyber security is still a poorly defined frontier, spread out across all of our intelligence branches. I think we’re doing better than we were but we’re still more vulnerable than we should be. Okay?”

The reporter was writing furiously.

“You said off the record.”

“It is.”

“Then why are you writing it down?”

She lifted her pen. The marks on the page seemed gibberish to Catherine Blaine. Some kind of shorthand.

“I know you pushed for more centralized efforts when you were in Congress,” she said, raising her chin. “And that you’ve talked about so-called unanticipated threats.”

Blaine smiled, surprised that the reporter knew this. She had written an article for
Foreign Affairs
magazine three years earlier—a freewheeling, somewhat controversial essay about the need to anticipate “unexpected threats.” She had been a government foreign policy professor then, never imagining she’d be out on the front lines again like this. “Well, yes. I think it’s important to look for things that we haven’t imagined before,” she said. “There are many potential threats that we haven’t adequately considered simply because nothing like them has ever occurred before. That’s what happened on 9/11. We hadn’t seriously imagined that possibility. We didn’t think about putting sky marshals on airplanes.”

The drizzle was suddenly becoming rain, misting the trees. Jamie Griffith stood in the doorway of the plane now, waiting. “Look,” Blaine said. “Why don’t we sit down sometime in Washington and
talk about it under more proper conditions? When we have a little more time.”

“I’d like to.”

“Call Jamie and he’ll set up something.”

“Thank you. I will.” The reporter stood there, scribbling, as Catherine Blaine began to climb the steps. Blaine couldn’t imagine what she was writing.

She took her seat across the aisle from Jamie, who was immersed in his laptop.

“Would you find out what the hell she’s talking about with those breaches?”

“Already have.” He handed her his computer. “AP and Drudge have it.”

Blaine squinted at the screen. The Drudge Report headlined it
CYBER
‘
GROUND ZERO
’
IN D.C.
?

She clicked the link and got the AP story. Scrolled through it quickly. It was cool in the plane and her suit felt damp and clammy.

Unconfirmed reports say the breaches may have originated in Beijing
.

“ ‘Unnamed sources.’ ‘Unconfirmed reports.’ ‘Reportedly.’ That’s not news,” Blaine said, handing it back. “I mean, there are breaches every single day. Can you put in a call to Director DeVries? I’d like to know why I haven’t been briefed on this.”

“Of course.”

“Where’s my BlackBerry?”

“I’m not sure. Did you—?”

“Never mind. I’m sitting on it.”

Blaine clicked on her government-issue mobile, typed in her code, and checked the message screen. Although she called it her BlackBerry, it was actually an SME-PED, or Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device, a custom unit developed by the National Security Agency for communications at the top secret level—verbal and secure encrypted email. Similar devices had been developed for high-level officials at the State Department, Defense, and CIA.

Blaine carried a second encrypted mobile device as a backup, along with her own standard-issue cell phone, which she considered her lifeline to the real world.

There were three messages for her on the SME-PED. One was from the assistant to the undersecretary of state, responding to her inquiry
about border crossing statistics for Arizona. Another was from White House Chief of Staff Gabriel Herring: the president reminding her about her briefing the next afternoon.

The third was a message from her son, Kevin.

Hi Mom—jst ud on ES sat

That was odd.

Catherine Blaine stared at the two and a half inch screen in her left hand, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Her son Kevin had never sent a message to her on the government mobile device before. In fact, he
couldn’t
have sent her one. SME-PED was part of a secure, top-secret-clearance network. Only nineteen people had access.

But there it was—her son’s quirky abbreviations:
ud
meaning “update.”
ES
for “Eastern Shore.”

Jamie’s voice tugged her away: “Cate, here’s the DNI’s office. I’ll transfer.”

She pressed the phone feature on her SME-PED and took the call as the plane moved toward the slick, open runway. “Catherine Blaine.”

“Secretary Blaine? It’s Susan Romero. The director is just coming out of a meeting and would very much like to speak with you. He said he will call you in three minutes. And he asked me to extend his apologies. There’s a lot going on at the moment.”

“I’m sure.” She sighed. “It’s a little disconcerting to have to learn about a national security breach from the media.”

“He’s very sorry. Three minutes.”

“All right, thank you.”

Blaine clicked off, and glanced at her watch.

The call from Harold DeVries, the director of national intelligence, came sixteen minutes later, as the plane was climbing through gray stratus clouds above the West Virginia mountains.

“I’m sorry, Cate,” he said. “I understand you had to hear about this thing from the press?”

“I’ll survive. What’s going on?”

“It isn’t much. We’re more concerned about the way it got out than the breach itself.”

“That’s what I thought.” She waited. DeVries had been a mentor
to Blaine when she was first elected to Congress, a shrewd man with a broad knowledge of international politics and an ability to quickly grasp complicated issues. She’d found him her best ally on the Cabinet, even if he was occasionally unreliable. “It must be a high-level source if the media’s taking it this seriously,” she added.