The President Is Missing: A Novel Read online

  “He’s secure, yes.”

  “Rod Sanchez?” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  “He’s secure,” Carolyn says.

  “Dom Dayton?” The secretary of defense.

  “Secure.”

  “Erica Beatty?”

  “Secure, sir.”

  “Sam Haber?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the vice president.”

  My circle of six.

  Carolyn says, “They’re all secure in the operations center.”

  Keep your head and find a way.

  “Have them ready to speak with me in a few minutes,” I say.

  Chapter

  88

  I return to the war room, where the computer techs are still giving it every effort they can muster. With their relatively young faces, their tired, bloodshot eyes, and the urgency of their actions, they look as much like students cramming for finals as they do cybersecurity experts trying to save the world.

  “Stop,” I say. “Everyone stop.”

  The room goes quiet. All eyes on me.

  “Is it possible,” I say, “that you people are too damn smart?”

  “Too smart, sir?”

  “Yes. Is it possible that you have so much knowledge, and you’re up against something so sophisticated, that you haven’t considered a simple solution? That you can’t see the forest for the trees?”

  Casey looks around the room, throws up a hand. “At this point, I’m open to—”

  “Show me,” I say. “I want to see this thing.”

  “The virus?”

  “Yes, Casey, the virus. The one that’s going to destroy our country, if you weren’t sure which virus I meant.”

  Everyone’s on edge, frazzled, an air of desperation in the room.

  “Sorry, sir.” She drops her head and goes to work on a laptop. “I’ll use the smartscreen,” she says, and for the first time I notice that the whiteboard is really some kind of computer smartboard.

  I look over at the smartscreen. A long menu of files suddenly appears. Casey scrolls down until she clicks on one.

  “Here it is,” she says. “Your virus.”

  I look at it, doing a double take:

  Suliman.exe

  “How humble of him,” I say. He named the virus after himself. “This is the file we couldn’t find for two weeks?”

  “Sir, it avoided detection,” says Casey. “Nina programmed it so it bypassed logging and—well, so it basically disappeared whenever we looked for it.”

  I shake my head. “So can you open this thing? Does it open?”

  “Yes, sir. It took us a while to do even that.” She types on her laptop, and the contents of the virus pop up on the smartscreen.

  I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a little green gargoyle, ready to gobble up data and files like some demented Pac-Man.

  It’s just a bunch of scrambled jumble. Six lines of symbols and letters—ampersands and pound signs, capital and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation marks—that bear no resemblance to a written word in any language.

  “Is this some kind of encrypted code we’re supposed to unravel?”

  “No,” says Augie. “It is obfuscated. Nina obfuscated the malicious code so it cannot be read, it cannot be reverse-engineered. The whole point is to make it unreadable.”

  “But you re-created it, didn’t you?”

  “We did, to a large extent,” says Augie. “You’ve got great people in this room, but we can’t be sure we re-created everything. And we know we did not re-create the timing mechanism.”

  I exhale, putting my hands on my hips, dropping my head.

  “Okay, so you can’t disable it. Kill it. Whatever.”

  Casey says, “That’s correct. When we try to disable or remove the virus, it activates.”

  “Explain ‘activates’ to me. You mean it deletes all the data?”

  “It overwrites all active files,” she says. “They can’t be reconstructed.”

  “So it’s like deleting a file and then deleting it again from the trash, like when I had my Macintosh in the nineties?”

  She wrinkles her nose. “No. Deleting is different. When something is deleted, it’s marked as deleted. It’s inactive, and it becomes unallocated space that could eventually be replaced when storage hits capacity—”

  “Casey, for Christ’s sake. Would you speak English?”

  She pushes her thick glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t really matter, sir. All I was saying was, when the user deletes a file, it doesn’t disappear immediately and forever. The computer marks it as deleted, so that space opens up in the memory, and it disappears from your active files. But an expert could reconstruct it. That’s not what this virus is doing. The wiper virus overwrites the data. And that is permanent.”

  “Show me,” I say again. “Show me the virus overwriting the data.”

  “Okay. We made a simulation in case you ever wanted to see it.” Casey runs through a couple things on the computer so fast that I don’t even know what she’s done. “Here is a random active file on this laptop. See it here? All the rows, the various properties of the file?”

  On the smartscreen, a box has opened up showing a single file’s properties. A series of horizontal rows, each occupied by a number or word.

  “Now I’ll show you that same file after the overwrite.”

  Suddenly a different image appears on the smartscreen.

  Again, I’d envisioned something dramatic, but the actual visual experience is decidedly anticlimactic.

  “It’s identical,” I say, “except the last three rows have been replaced with a zero.”

  “That’s the overwrite. The zero. We can never reconstruct it once it’s gone.”

  A bunch of zeros. America will be transformed into a third-world country by a bunch of zeros.

  “Show me the virus again,” I say.

  She pops it back on the screen, the amalgamation of numbers and symbols and letters.

  “So this thing goes kaboom, and everything vanishes like that?” I snap my fingers.

  “Not quite,” says Casey. “Some wiper viruses act that way. This one goes file by file. It’s fairly quick, but it’s slower than the snap of a finger. It’s like the difference between dying suddenly from a massive coronary versus dying slowly from cancer.”

  “How slow is slowly?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know, about twenty minutes.”

  Find a way.

  “That thing has a timing mechanism inside it?”

  “It might. We can’t tell.”

  “Well, what’s the other possibility?”

  “That it’s waiting for a command to execute. That the viruses in each affected device are communicating with one another. One of them will issue a command to execute, and they all will, simultaneously.”

  I look at Augie. “Which is it?”

  He shrugs. “I do not know. I’m sorry. Nina did not share that with me.”

  “Well, can’t we play with the time?” I ask. “Can’t we change the time on the computer so it’s a different year? If it’s set to go off today, can’t we change the clock and calendar back a century? So it thinks it has to wait a hundred years to go off? I mean, how the hell does this virus know what date and what year it is if we tell it something different?”

  Augie shakes his head. “Nina would not have tied it to a computer’s clock,” he says. “It’s too imprecise and too easy to manipulate. Either it’s master-controlled or she gave it a specific amount of time. She would start back from the desired date and time, calculate it in terms of seconds, and tell it to detonate in that many seconds.”

  “Three years ago she did that?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. It would be simple multiplication. It would be trillions of seconds, but so be it. It’s still just mathematics.”

  I deflate.

  “If you can’t change the timer,” I ask, “how did you guys make this virus go off?”

  “We
tried to remove the virus or disable it,” says Devin. “And it detonated. It has a trigger function, like a booby trap, that recognizes hostile activity.”

  “Nina did not expect anyone to ever detect it,” says Augie. “And she was correct. No one did. But she installed this trigger in case someone did.”

  “Okay,” I say, pacing the room. “Work with me. Think big picture. Big picture but simple.”

  Everyone nods, concentrating, as if readjusting their thinking. These people are accustomed to sophistication, to brainteasers, to matching wits with other experts.

  “Can we—can we somehow quarantine the virus? Put it inside a box that it can’t see out of?”

  Augie is shaking his head before I’ve finished my sentence. “It will overwrite all active files, Mr. President. No ‘box’ would change that.”

  “We tried that, believe me,” says Casey. “Many different versions of that idea. We can’t isolate the virus from the rest of the files.”

  “Can we…couldn’t we just unplug every device from the Internet?”

  Her head inclines. “Possibly. It’s possible that this is a distributive system, meaning the viruses are communicating from device to device, like we just said, and one of them will send an ‘execute’ command to the other viruses. It’s possible that she set it up that way. So if she did, then yes, if we disconnected everything from the Internet, that ‘execute’ command wouldn’t be received and the wiper virus wouldn’t activate.”

  “Okay. So…” I lean forward.

  “Sir, if we disconnect everything from the Internet…we disconnect everything from the Internet. If we order every Internet service provider in the country to shut off…”

  “Then everything reliant on the Internet would shut down.”

  “We’d be doing their work for them, sir.”

  “And we’d be doing that not even knowing if it would be successful, sir,” says Devin. “For all we know, each virus has its own internal timer, independent of the Internet. The individual viruses might not be communicating with one another. We just don’t know.”

  “Okay.” I spin my hands around each other. “Keep going. Keep thinking. What about…what happens to the wiper virus after it’s done wiping?”

  Devin opens his hands. “After it’s done, the computer’s crashed. Once the core operating files are overwritten, the computer crashes forever.”

  “But what happens to the virus?”

  Casey shrugs. “What happens to a cancer cell after the host body dies?”

  “So you’re saying the virus dies when the computer dies?”

  “I…” Casey looks at Devin, then Augie. “Everything dies.”

  “Well, what if the computer crashed but you reinstalled the operating software and booted the computer back up? Would the virus be right there waiting for us again? Or would it be dead? Or asleep forever, at least?”

  Devin thinks about that for a second. “It wouldn’t matter, sir. The files you care about are already overwritten, gone forever.”

  “Could we—I don’t suppose we could just turn off all our computers and wait for the time to pass?”

  “No, sir.”

  I step back and look at all three of them, Casey, Devin, and Augie. “Back to work. Be creative. Turn everything upside down. Find. A. Way.”

  I storm out of the room, nearly running into Alex in the process, and head to the communications room.

  It will be my last chance. My Hail Mary.

  Chapter

  89

  My circle of six, all appearing before me on the computer screen. One of these six individuals—Brendan Mohan, NSA head; Rodrigo Sanchez, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Dominick Dayton, secretary of defense; Erica Beatty, CIA director; Sam Haber, secretary of homeland security; and Vice President Katherine Brandt—one of them…

  “A traitor?” says Sam Haber, breaking the silence.

  “It had to be one of you,” I say.

  I can’t deny a certain relief, having finally spilled it. For the last four days I’ve known that there was someone on the inside working with our enemy. It’s colored my every interaction with this group. It feels good to finally reveal the truth to them.

  “So here’s where we are,” I say. “Whoever you are, I don’t know why you did it. Money, I suppose, because I can’t bring myself to believe that any of you, who have devoted your lives to public service, would hate this country so much that you’d want to see it go down in flames.

  “Maybe you got in over your head. Maybe you thought this was some garden-variety hack. Some theft of sensitive information or something. You didn’t realize that you’d be unleashing the hounds of hell on our country. And by the time you did realize it, it was too late to turn back. I could believe that. I could believe that you didn’t intend for things to get this bad.”

  What I’m saying must be true. I can’t believe that our traitor really wants to destroy our country. He or she may have been compromised somehow with blackmail, or may have succumbed to good old-fashioned bribery, but I just can’t believe that one of these six people is secretly an agent of a foreign government who wants to destroy the United States.

  But even if I’m wrong, I want the traitor to think I’m seeing things this way. I’m trying to give him or her an out.

  “But none of that matters now,” I continue. “What matters is stopping this virus before it detonates and wreaks its havoc. So I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do.”

  I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I have no other choice.

  “Whoever you are, if you step forward and help me stop the virus, I’ll pardon you for all the crimes you’ve committed.”

  I search the faces of the six as I say these words, but the screens are too small to note any particular reaction.

  “Whoever you are, the other five of you are witnesses to what I’ve just said. I will pardon you of all your crimes if you cooperate with me, if you help me stop the virus and tell me who is behind this.

  “And I will classify the information. You will resign your position and leave the country immediately and never come back. Nobody will know why you left. Nobody will know what you did. If you received money from our enemy, you can keep it. You will leave this country, and you’ll never be allowed back in. But you’ll have your freedom. Which is one hell of a lot more than you deserve.

  “If you don’t come forward now, know this: you will not get away with it. I will not rest until we figure out who is responsible. You will be prosecuted and convicted of so many crimes I couldn’t list them all. But one of them will be treason against the United States. You will be sentenced to death.”

  I take a breath. “So that’s it,” I say. “You can choose freedom, and probably riches, with a complete cover-up of what you’ve done. Or you can be remembered as the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg or the Robert Hanssen of this generation. This is the easiest decision you’ll ever have to make.

  “This offer expires in thirty minutes or until the virus goes off, whichever is sooner,” I say. “Make a good decision.”

  I terminate the connection and walk out of the room.

  Chapter

  90

  I stand in the kitchen looking out over the backyard, the woods. The light is quickly dimming outside. It’s an hour, give or take, until sunset, and the sun has fallen behind the trees. “Saturday in America” has only five hours remaining.

  And it’s been eleven minutes and thirty seconds since I issued my offer to the circle of six.

  Noya Baram walks up beside me. Takes my hand, wraps her bony, delicate fingers in mine.

  “I wanted to give my country a new spirit,” I say. “I wanted to make us closer. I wanted us to feel like we were all in this together. Or at least get us moving in that direction. I thought I could. I really thought I could do that.”

  “You still can,” she says.

  “I’ll be lucky if I can keep us alive,” I say. “And keep us from killing each other over a loaf of bread o
r a gallon of gas.”

  Our nation will survive this. I do believe that. But we will be set so far back. We will suffer so much in the process.

  “What haven’t I done, Noya?” I ask. “What am I not doing that I should be doing?”

  She exhales an elaborate sigh. “Are you preparing to mobilize all active and reserve forces if necessary to preserve order?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you secured the leadership of the other two branches of government?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you preparing emergency measures to stabilize the markets?”

  “Already drafted,” I say. “What I mean, Noya, is what am I not doing to stop this?”

  “Ah. What do you do when you know an enemy is coming and you can’t stop it?” She turns to me. “There are many world leaders in history who would have liked to know the answer to that question.”

  “Count me as one of them.”

  She turns and looks at me. “What did you do in Iraq when your plane was shot down?”

  A helicopter, actually—a Black Hawk on a search-and-rescue mission for a downed F-16 pilot near Basra. The time between the Iraqi SAM obliterating our tail section and the bird spiraling to the ground couldn’t have been more than five or ten seconds.

  I shrug. “I just prayed for myself and my team and told myself I wouldn’t give up any information.”

  That’s my standard line. Only Rachel and Danny know the truth.

  I’d somehow been tossed from the rapidly descending aircraft. To this day it’s a blur of spinning, stomach-churning motion, the smoke and smell of aircraft fuel gagging me. Then the desert sand rose up to absorb much of my contorted hard landing but knocked the wind from me nonetheless.

  Sand in my eyes, sand in my mouth. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. But I could hear. I could hear the animated shouts of the Republican Guard approaching, calling out to one another in their native tongue, their voices growing closer.

  My rifle was nowhere in sight. I tried to make my right arm work. I tried to roll over. But I couldn’t reach it. My sidearm was pinned underneath my body.

  I couldn’t move at all. My collarbone was shattered, my shoulder badly dislocated, my arm like an appendage broken off a toy doll under the weight of my body.