The President Is Missing: A Novel (22 page)

T
he assembled dignitaries eat a light breakfast of bagels and fruit and coffee in the eat-in kitchen overlooking the backyard and woods as I update them on where we are so far. I’ve just received an update on Los Angeles, where Homeland Security and FEMA, under DHS’s umbrella, are working with the city and the state of California on the delivery of clean water. There have always been contingency plans for the suspension or failure of water-purification plants, so in the short term, while there will be a sense of urgency to get the plant up and running again, with any luck it will never bloom into a full-scale crisis. I won’t send my Imminent Threat Response Team out there, but we’re sending everyone else we have.

I may be wrong about LA. It may not be a decoy. It might be ground zero for whatever is coming. If that’s true, I’ve made an enormous mistake. But without more to go on, I am not letting go of my team. They’re currently in the basement with Augie and the cybersecurity experts from Israel and Germany, working in concert with the rest of our team, stationed at the Pentagon.

Chancellor Juergen Richter sits with his one aide, a fair-haired young man named Dieter Kohl, the head of Germany’s BND, its international intelligence service. Prime Minister Noya Baram brought her chief of staff, a stout, formal, older man who once served as a general in the Israeli army.

We’re trying to keep this meeting a secret, which means we had to keep it small. One leader and one aide each, plus their technical gurus. This isn’t 1942, when FDR and Churchill met secretly at a spot just off the Intracoastal Waterway, in southern Florida, for a series of war conferences. They ate at a great restaurant called Cap’s Place and sent the owner letters of appreciation, which are now the treasures of an eatery otherwise known for its seafood, Key lime pie, and 1940s atmosphere.

Nowadays, with an emboldened and ravenous press, the Internet and social media, all eyes on world leaders day and night, it is exceptionally difficult for any of us to move about incognito. The only thing in our favor is security: given terrorism threats these days, we are able to keep the specifics of our travel plans under wraps.

Noya Baram is attending a conference tomorrow in Manhattan and said she was using Saturday to visit family in the United States. Considering she has a daughter who lives in Boston, a brother outside Chicago, and a grandchild completing her freshman year at Columbia, her alibi is plausible. Whether it will hold up is another story.

Chancellor Richter used his wife’s cancer as a cover, moving up a scheduled trip to Sloan Kettering to yesterday, Friday. Their stated plan is to spend the weekend in New York City with friends.

“Excuse me,” I say to the group gathered in the cabin’s living room as my phone buzzes. “I have to take this call. It’s—it’s one of those days.”

I wish I had an aide with me, too, but I need Carolyn at the White House, and there isn’t anybody else I can trust.

I move onto the deck overlooking the woods. The Secret Service is taking the lead, but there is a small contingent of German and Israeli agents in the yard and spread out around the property.

“Mr. President,”
says Liz Greenfield.
“The girl, Nina. Her fingerprints came back. Her name is Nina Shinkuba. We don’t have much of a dossier on her, but we think she was born almost twenty-six years ago in the Abkhazia region of the republic of Georgia.”

“The separatist territory,” I say. “The disputed territory.” The Russians backed Abkhazia’s claim of autonomy from Georgia. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was fought over it, at least ostensibly.

“Yes, sir. Nina Shinkuba was suspected by the Georgian government of bombing a train station on the Georgian side of the disputed border in 2008. There was a series of attacks on both sides of the border before the war broke out between Abkhazia and Georgia.”

Which became the war between Russia and Georgia.

“She was a separatist?”

“Apparently. The republic of Georgia calls her a terrorist.”

“So that would put her in the category of anti-Western,” I say. “Would it also make her pro-Russian?”

“The Russians were with them. The Russians and Abkhazians fought on the same side of that war. It’s a logical inference.”

But not an automatic one.

“Should we reach out to the Georgians to see what else we can learn about her?”

“Hold that thought,” I say. “I want to ask someone else first.”

I
only knew her as Nina,” says Augie, haggard from his work in the basement, rubbing his eyes as we stand together in the cabin’s living room.

“No last name. That didn’t strike you as odd? You fell in love with a woman and you didn’t know her last name?”

He lets out a sigh. “I knew she had a past she was escaping. I did not know the details. I did not care.”

I watch him, but he doesn’t say more, doesn’t seem to be struggling to explain himself any more than that.

“She was an Abkhazian separatist,” I say. “They worked with the Russians.”

“So you have said. If she was…sympathetic to Russia, it was never something she shared with me. You have always known, Mr. President, that the Sons of Jihad attacked Western institutions. We oppose the influence of the West in southeastern Europe. Of course, this is consistent with the Russian agenda. But this does not mean that we work for the Russians. My understanding is that, yes, Suliman has accepted money from the Russians in the past, but he no longer needs their money.”

“He sells his services to the highest bidder,” I say.

“He does whatever he wants. Not always for money. He answers to no man but himself.”

That’s how our intelligence has understood it, too.

“That’s how Nina was injured,” I say. “That shrapnel in her head. She said a missile struck close to a church. It was the Georgians. It must have been.”

Augie’s eyes trail away, looking off into the distance, filling with tears. “Does it really matter?” he whispers.

“It matters if she was working with the Russians, Augie. If I can figure out who’s behind this, I have more options at my disposal.”

Augie nods, still looking off in the distance. “Threats. Deterrence. Mr. President,” he says, “if we cannot stop this virus, your threats will be empty. Your attempts at deterrence will mean nothing.”

But the virus hasn’t hit yet. We are still the most powerful country in the world.

Maybe it’s time I reminded Russia of that fact.

Augie returns to the basement. I pull out my phone and dial Carolyn.

“Carrie,” I say, “are the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be on in two minutes,” I say.

M
r. President,” says Chancellor Richter with his usual regal formality, as he shoots the French cuffs on his shirt. “I require no convincing of the Russians’ involvement in this attack. As you know, Germany has experienced several such incidents in our recent past. The Bundestag affair, the CDU headquarters. We are still experiencing the effects today.”

He’s referring to the 2015 hacking into the servers of the German Bundestag, the lower house of the federal legislature. The hackers scooped up e-mails and loads of sensitive information before the Germans finally detected it and patched it up. Leaks of that information continue to spill out on the Internet, strategic drip by strategic drip, to this day.

And the headquarters of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party—Chancellor Richter’s party—was hacked as well, involving the theft of many documents containing sensitive and sometimes blunt exchanges on topics of political strategy, campaign coordination, and key issues.

Both these attacks have been attributed to a group of cyberterrorist hackers known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, affiliated with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.

“We are aware of approximately seventy-five attempted cyberterrorist incidents since Bundestag and the CDU,” says Richter’s aide, Dieter Kohl, Germany’s top foreign intelligence officer. “I speak of phishing expeditions into the servers belonging to federal and local governments and various political parties, all of them hostile to the Kremlin. I speak of incidents involving government institutions, industry, labor unions, think tanks. All of them,” he says, “attributed to Fancy Bear.”

“Much of the information they have…” Chancellor Richter turns to his colleague, searching for the right word. “Exfiltrated, yes. Much of the information they have exfiltrated has not yet been leaked. We are expecting, as the election season approaches, to be seeing it. So, Mr. President, I can say to you that Germany requires no convincing on the question of whether the Russians are involved.”

“But this is different,” says Prime Minister Noya Baram. “If I am right about the virus you detected on the Pentagon server, there were no…bread crumbs, I believe you’d say.”

“Correct,” I say. “This time the hackers didn’t leave behind any trace. No fingerprints. No bread crumbs. It just showed up out of nowhere and disappeared without a trace.”

“And that is not the only difference,” she continues. “Your concern, Jonny, is not the theft of information. Your concern is the stability of your infrastructure.”

“It’s both,” I say, “but you’re correct, Noya. I’m worried that they’re attacking our systems. The place where the virus showed up, when it winked at us before disappearing—it’s part of our operational infrastructure. They aren’t stealing e-mails. They’re compromising our systems.”

“And I am told,” says Chancellor Richter, “that if anyone can do it, it is the Sons of Jihad. Our people”—he looks at his foreign intelligence chief, who nods—“they tell us the SOJ is the best in the world. One would think that we could find people just as competent. But what we are learning is no, in fact there are very few elite cyberterrorists and just as few, if not fewer, elite cyberdefense experts. In our country, we have formed a new cybercommand, but we are having trouble filling the positions. We have maybe a dozen, more or less, who would qualify as good enough to defend against the most able cyberterrorists.”

“It’s like anything else,” I say. “Sports, the arts, academia. There are some people at the very top of the pyramid who are simply more skilled than everyone else. Israel has many of them on the defense side. Israel has the best cyberdefense systems in the world.” I nod to Noya, who accepts the compliment without objection; it is a source of pride for the Israelis.

“And if Israel plays the best defense,” says Richter, “Russia plays the best offense.”

“But now we have Augie.”

Richter nods, his eyes narrowing. Noya looks at Richter, then at me. “And you are confident you can trust this man, this Augustas Koslenko?”

“Noya.” I open my hands. “I’m confident that I have no other choice
but
to trust him. Our people can’t unlock this thing. They can’t even find it.” I sit back in my chair. “He tipped us off to it. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t even know about it.”

“So he says.”

“So he says,” I concede. “True. Look, whoever is ultimately behind this, the SOJ or Russia or someone else—yes, they may have sent Augie to me. He may have some ulterior motive. I’ve been waiting to hear it. I’ve been waiting for some demand, some ransom. I’m not hearing it. And remember, they tried to kill him. Twice. So for my money, he’s a threat to them. Which means he’s an asset to us. I have my best people, and
your
best people, and Juergen’s best people, watching every move he makes downstairs, listening and learning and probing. We even have a camera on the room, just to keep an eye on him.” I throw up my hands. “If anyone has a better idea, I’m open to it. Otherwise, this is the best thing I can do to try to avoid…” My words trail off. I can’t bring myself to say them.

“To avoid…what?” asks Richter. “Do we have a sense of the possible harm? We can all speculate. We can all conjure up nightmare scenarios. What does the boy say?”

It’s a good segue, one of the principal reasons I’ve asked the German chancellor here today.

I turn to Alex, standing in the far corner of the living room. “Alex, bring Augie up here,” I say. “You all should hear this for yourselves.”

A
ugie stands before the world leaders present in the living room, fatigued and frazzled, wearing ill-fitting clothes we found for him after a shower, overwhelmed in every way by the events of the last twelve hours. Yet this young man seems not even slightly fazed by the company he is keeping. They are men and women of tremendous accomplishments, with incredible power at their fingertips, but in this arena, he is the teacher, and we are the pupils.

“One of the great ironies of the modern age,” he begins, “is that the advancements of mankind can make us more powerful and yet more vulnerable at the same time. The greater the power, the greater the vulnerability. You think, rightly so, that you are at the apex of your power, that you can do more things than ever before. But I see you at the peak of your vulnerability.

“The reason is reliance. Our society has become completely reliant on technology. The Internet of Things—you are familiar with the concept?”

“More or less,” I say. “The connection of devices to the Internet.”

“Yes, essentially. And not just laptop computers and smartphones. Anything with a power switch. Washing machines, coffeemakers, DVRs, digital cameras, thermostats, machine components, jet engines—the list of things, large and small, is almost endless. Two years ago, there were fifteen billion devices connected to the Internet. Two years from now? I have read estimates that the number will be fifty billion. I have heard one hundred billion. The layperson can hardly turn on a television anymore without seeing a commercial about the latest smart device and how it will do something you never would have thought possible twenty years ago. It will order flowers for you. It will let you see someone standing outside the front door of your home while you are at work. It will tell you if there is road construction up ahead and a faster route to your destination.”

“And all that connectivity makes us more vulnerable to malware and spyware,” I say. “We understand that. But I’m not so concerned, right at the moment, about whether Siri will tell me the weather in Buenos Aires or whether some foreign nation is spying on me through my toaster.”

Augie moves about the room, as if lecturing on a large stage to an audience of thousands. “No, no—but I have digressed. More to the point, nearly every sophisticated form of automation, nearly every transaction in the modern world, relies on the Internet. Let me say it like this: we depend on the power grid for electricity, do we not?”

“Of course.”

“And without electricity? It would be chaos. Why?” He looks at each of us, awaiting an answer.

“Because there’s no substitute for electricity,” I say. “Not really.”

He points at me. “Correct. Because we are so reliant on something that has no substitute.”

“And the same is now true of the Internet,” says Noya, as much to herself as to anyone else.

Augie bows slightly. “Most assuredly, Madam Prime Minister. A whole host of functions that were once performed without the Internet now can
only
be performed
with
the Internet. There is no fallback. Not anymore. And you are correct—the world will not collapse if we cannot ask our smartphones what the capital of Indonesia is. The world will not collapse if our microwave ovens stop heating up our breakfast burritos or if our DVRs stop working.”

Augie paces a bit, looking down, hands in his pockets, every bit the professor in midlecture.

“But what if
everything
stopped working?” he says.

The room goes silent. Chancellor Richter, raising a cup of coffee to his lips, freezes midstream. Noya looks like she’s holding her breath.

Dark Ages,
I think to myself.

“But the Internet is not as vulnerable as you are saying,” says Dieter Kohl, who may not be Augie’s equal on these matters but is far more knowledgeable than any of the elected officials in the room. “A server may become compromised, slowing or even blocking traffic, but then another one is used. The traffic routes are dynamic.”

“But what if every route were compromised?” Augie asks.

Kohl works that over, his mouth pursed as if about to speak, suspended in that position. He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “How would…that be possible?”

“It would be possible with time, patience, and skill,” says Augie. “If the virus was not detected when it infiltrated the server. And if it stayed dormant after infiltration.”

“How did you infiltrate the servers? Phishing attacks?”

Augie makes a face, as if insulted. “On occasion. But primarily, no. Primarily we used misdirection. DDoS attacks, corruption of the BGP tables.”

“Augie,” I say.

“Oh, yes, I apologize. Speak English, you said. Very well. A DDoS attack is a distributed denial-of-service attack. A flood attack, essentially, on the network of servers that convert the URL addresses we type into our browsers into IP numbers that Internet routers use.”

“Augie,” I say again.

He smiles in apology. “Here: you type in www.cnn.com, but the network converts it to a routing number to direct traffic. A flood attack sends bogus traffic to the network and overwhelms it, so the network stalls or crashes. In October of 2016, a DDoS attack shut down many servers, and thus many prominent websites in America, for nearly an entire day. Twitter, PlayStation, CNN, Spotify, Verizon, Comcast, not to mention thousands of online retail operations, were all disrupted.

“And then the corruption of the BGP tables—the border gateway protocol tables. The service providers, such as, for example, AT&T—they will essentially advertise on those tables who their clients are. If Company ABC uses AT&T for Internet service, then AT&T will advertise on those tables, ‘If you want to access Company ABC’s website, go through us.’ Let’s say you’re in China, for example, using VelaTel, and you want to access Company ABC’s website. You will have to hop from VelaTel to NTT in Japan, and then hop to AT&T in America. The BGP tables tell you the path. We, of course, just type in a website or click on a link, but often what is happening almost instantaneously is a series of hops across Internet service providers, using the BGP tables as a map.

“The problem is that these BGP tables are set up on trust. You may recall that several years ago, VelaTel, called ChinaTel at the time, claimed one day that it was the final hop for traffic to the Pentagon, and thus for some period of time, a good portion of Internet traffic intended for the Pentagon was routed through China.”

I know about it now, but I wasn’t aware of it then. I was just the governor of North Carolina back then. Simpler times. The understatement of the century.

“A sophisticated hacker,” says Augie, “could invade the BGP tables at the top twenty Internet service providers around the world, scramble the tables, and thus misdirect traffic. It would be the same effect as a DDoS attack. It would temporarily shut down Internet service to anyone served by that provider.”

“But how does that relate to the installation of the virus?” asks Noya. “The object of a DDoS attack, as I understand it, is to shut down Internet service to a provider.”

“Yes.”

“And it sounds as if this—this scrambling of the BGP tables has the same effect.”

“Yes. And as you can imagine, it is very serious. A service provider cannot afford to lose service to its customers. That is its whole reason for existence. It must act immediately to fix the problem or it will lose its customers and go out of business.”

“Of course,” says Noya.

“As I said before, misdirection.” Augie waves a hand. “We used the BGP tables and the DDoS attacks as platforms to invade the servers.”

Noya raises her chin, getting it now. Augie had to explain all this to me more than once. “So while they were focusing on that emergency, you snuck in and planted the virus.”

“An accurate enough summary, yes.” Augie cannot help but beam with pride. “And because the virus was dormant—because it was hidden and performed no malicious function—they never noticed.”

“Dormant for how long?” asks Dieter Kohl.

“Years. I believe we started…” He looks upward, squints. “Three years ago?”

“The virus has been lying dormant for three years?”

“In some cases, yes.”

“And you’ve infected how many servers?”

Augie takes a breath, a child prepared to deliver bad news to his parents. “The virus is programmed to infect every node—every device that receives Internet service from the provider.”

“And…” Kohl pauses, as if afraid to probe further, afraid to open the door to the dark closet to find out what’s hidden inside. “Approximately how many Internet service providers did you infect?”

“Approximately?” Augie shrugs his shoulders. “All of them,” he says.

Everyone wilts under the news. Richter, unable to sit still, rises from his chair and leans against the wall, folding his arms. Noya whispers something to her aide. People of great power, feeling powerless.

“If you have infected every Internet service provider in the country, and those providers have, in turn, passed on the virus to every client, every node, every device, that means…” Dieter Kohl falls back in his chair.

“We have infected virtually every device that uses the Internet in the United States.”

The prime minister and chancellor both look at me, each turning pale. The attack we are discussing is on America, but they know full well that their countries could be next.

Which is part of the reason I wanted Augie to explain this to them.

“Just the United States?” Chancellor Richter asks. “The Internet connects the entire world.”

“A fair point,” says Augie. “We targeted only the ISPs in the United States. No doubt there will be some transfer to other countries as data from American devices is sent abroad. There is no way to know for certain, but we wouldn’t expect the spread to be significant. We were focusing on the United States. The goal was to cripple the United States.”

This is far broader than our worst fears. When the virus peeked at us, it was on a Pentagon server. We all thought military. Or government, at least. But Augie is telling us it goes far, far beyond government usage. It will affect every industry, countless aspects of daily life, every household, all facets of our lives.

“What you’re telling us,” says Chancellor Richter, his voice shaky, “is that you’re going to steal the Internet from America.”

Augie looks at Richter, then at me.

“Yes, but that’s just the beginning,” I say. “Augie, tell them what the virus will do.”