CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013 Read online

  Foreword by the author:

  I would like to thank the many people who lent me their time and insight into helping make this a realistic a scenario of a full-scale cyber event:

  ---

  Richard Marshall,

  frmr Global Director of Cybersecurity, US DHS

  and Information Assurance to NSA

  Curtis Levinson,

  United States Cyber Defense Liaison to NATO

  Major Alex Aquino,

  Head of Cyber Operations, USAF WADS

  Erik Montcalm

  Director of Security Technologies, SecureOps

  ---

  And I have added a Special Thanks section at the end of the novel for all my beta readers, listing everyone individually.

  ---

  You can follow me on

  www.matthewmather.com

  CyberStorm

  Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Matthew Mather

  ISBN: 978-0-9916771-7-7

  Cover image by Vaseem Baig

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  IN THE DIM light I could see five people huddled together in the bare metal box, sitting on soiled sheets and clothing. One of them threw me a blanket, and I took it, mumbling my thanks while I covered myself, shivering.

  Can I trust them? I didn’t have much choice. Freezing cold and wet, I’d die out there on my own. This small box was as close to salvation as I had anymore. How can I fight back when I can barely survive? I had to get back into the mountains.

  “How long have they been here?” I asked again, my teeth chattering.

  Silence.

  I was about to give up when one of the occupants sitting in the corner away from me, a kid with blond hair and a baseball cap, replied, “A few weeks.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cyberstorm, that’s what happened,” said a kid with a mohawk sitting next to him. He had about a dozen piercings, and that was just what I could see. “Where have you been?”

  “New York.”

  A pause. “That was pretty intense up there, huh?”

  I nodded—all the horror summed up in one tiny gesture.

  “Where’s our military?” I asked. “How could they let us get invaded?”

  “I’m glad they’re here,” replied Mohawk.

  “You’re glad?” I yelled. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Blondie sat upright.

  “Hey, man, calm the hell down. We don’t want any trouble, okay?”

  Shaking my head, I pulled the blanket up around me.

  These kids are the future? No wonder all this had happened. Just weeks ago, America had seemed indestructible, but now...

  Somehow, we had failed.

  All that remained important was to find my family, to keep them safe.

  Sighing, I closed my eyes and turned away from the others, pressing my face against the cold metal, listening to the rumble that pulled me deeper into the night.

  November 25

  Chelsea, New York City

  “WE LIVE IN amazing times!”

  I carefully studied the piece of charred flesh that I held up in front of me.

  “Amazingly dangerous times,” laughed Chuck, my next-door neighbor and best friend, taking a swig from his beer. “Nice work. That’s probably still frozen on the inside.”

  Shaking my head, I put the burnt sausage down at the edge of the grill.

  It was an unusually warm week for Thanksgiving, so I’d decided to throw a last-minute barbecue party on the rooftop terrace of our converted warehouse complex. Most of our neighbors were still here for the holiday, so my two-year-old son, Luke, and I had spent the morning going door-to-door, inviting them all up for our grill-out.

  “Don’t insult my cooking, and don’t get started on all that.”

  It was a spectacular end of the day, with the setting sun shining warmly. From our seven-story perch, beautiful late-autumn views of red and gold trees stretched up and down the Hudson, backed by street noise and city skyline. New York still held a vibrancy that excited me, even after two years of living there. I looked around at the crowd of our neighbors. We’d gathered a group of thirty people for our little party, and I was secretly proud so many had come.

  “So you don’t think it’s possible a solar flare could wreck the world?” said Chuck, raising his eyebrows.

  His Southern twang made even disasters sound like song lyrics, and kicking back on a sun lounger in ripped jeans and a Ramones T-shirt, he looked like a rock star. His hazel eyes twinkled playfully from beneath a mop of unkempt blond hair, and two-day-old stubble completed the look.

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want you to get started on.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “What you’re saying always points to disaster.” I rolled my eyes. “We’ve just lived through one of the most amazing transitions in human history.”

  Poking the sausages on the grill, I generated a new round of searing flames that leapt up.

  Tony, one of our doormen, was standing next to me, still dressed in his work clothes and tie, but at least with his suit jacket off. Heavyset, with dark Italian features, he was as Brooklyn as the Dodgers of old, and his accent never let you forget it. Tony was the kind of guy that grew on you immediately, always ready to help, and never without a smile and a joke to go along with it.

  Luke loved him too. From the moment he could walk, every time we went downstairs, Luke would go rocketing out of the elevator as soon as it pinged to ground level and run to the front desk to greet Tony with squeals of glee. The feelings were mutual.

  Looking up from my sausages, I directly addressed Chuck. “Over a billion people have been born in the past decade—that’s like a new New York City each month for the last ten years—the fastest population growth that has ever been, or ever will be.”

  I waved my tongs around impressively in the air to make my point.

  “Sure there’ve been a few wars here and there, but nothing major. I think that says something about the human race.” I paused for effect. “We’re maturing.”

  “That billion new people are still mostly sucking baby formula,” Chuck pointed out. “Wait fifteen years until they all want cars and washing machines. Then we’ll see how mature we are.”

  “World poverty in real-dollar, per-capita terms is half what it was forty years ago—”

  “And yet one in six Americans goes hungry, and the majority are malnourished,” interrupted Chuck.

  “And for the first time in human history, just a year or two ago,” I continued, “most humans live in cities rather than the countryside.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  Tony looked at me and Chuck and shook his head, taking a swig of his beer and smiling. This was a well-worn sparring match he’d watched many times before.

  “It is a good thing,” I pointed out. “Urban environments are way more energy efficient than rural ones.”

  “Except urban is not an environment,” argued Chuck. “The environment is an environment. You talk as if cities were these self-supporting bubbles, and they’re not. They’re entirely dependent on the natural world around them.”

  I pointed my tongs at him. “That same world we’re saving by living together in cities.”

  Returning my attention to the barbecue, I saw that the fat dripping off the sausages had ignited into flames again and was searing my chicken breasts.

  “I’
m just saying that when it all comes undone—”

  “When a terrorist launches a nuke over the US? An EMP pulse?” I asked as I rearranged my meats. “Or a weaponized superbug let loose in the wild?”

  “Any of those,” nodded Chuck.

  “You know what you should be worried about?”

  “What?”

  I didn’t need to give him anything new to be obsessed with, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d just finished reading an article about it.

  “Cyberattack.”

  Looking over his shoulder, I could see that my wife’s parents had arrived, and my stomach knotted up. What I wouldn’t have given to have a simple relationship with my in-laws, but then again, that was a boat most people were rowing with me.

  “Ever heard of something called Night Dragon?” I asked.

  Chuck and Tony shrugged.

  “A few years back they started finding foreign computer code embedded in power plant control systems all over the country,” I explained. “They traced command and control back to office buildings in China. This stuff was specifically designed to knock out the US energy grid.”

  Chuck looked at me, unimpressed. “So? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, yet, but your attitude is the problem. It’s everyone’s attitude. If Chinese nationals were running around the country attaching packs of C-4 explosives to transmission towers, the public would be crying bloody murder and declaring war.”

  “Used to be that they dropped bombs to knock out factories, but now just click a mouse?”

  “Exactly.”

  “See?” said Chuck, smiling. “There’s a prepper in you after all.”

  I laughed. “Answer me this—who’s in charge of the internet, this thing that our lives depend on?”

  “I don’t know, the government?”

  “The answer is that nobody is in charge of it. Everyone runs it, but nobody’s in charge.”

  “Now that sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

  “You guys are freaking me out,” said Tony, finally finding some space to add something. “Can’t we talk about baseball?”

  “Don’t listen to us,” I laughed. “We’re just fooling around. You’re going to live a long life, my friend. Trust me.”

  “I do trust you, Mr. Mitchell.”

  “Tony, please, could you call me Mike?”

  “Yes, Mr. Mitchell,” he laughed back. “Maybe you’d better let me take over the grilling?” The flames on the grill roared up again, and he recoiled in mock fear. “You got more important stuff to do, no?”

  “And we’d like to eat some food that’s not burnt to a crisp,” added Chuck with a smile.

  “Yeah, sure,” I replied without enthusiasm, nodding and handing the tongs over to Tony. I was hiding at the grill, trying to delay the inevitable.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see my wife, Lauren, looking toward me. She laughed as she talked to someone, brushing back her long, auburn hair with a sweep of one hand.

  With high cheekbones and flashing green eyes, Lauren captured attention whenever she entered a room. She had the refined, strong features of her family, a sharp nose and chin that accentuated her slim figure. Even after being with her for five years, just looking at her from across a patio could still take my breath away—I still couldn’t believe that she chose me.

  Taking a deep breath, I straightened up my shoulders.

  “I leave the grill in your care,” I said to nobody in particular. They were already back to discussing Cybergeddon.

  Taking a swig from my beer, I put it down on the table next to the grill and turned to walk over to Lauren. She was standing at the opposite corner of the large deck on top of our building, chatting with her parents and a few of our other neighbors. I’d insisted on hosting her mother and father for Thanksgiving this year, but was already regretting it.

  Her family was old-money Bostonian, dyed-in-the-tweed Brahmins, and while early on I’d done my best to earn their good humor, lately I’d given up and settled into a grudging understanding that I’d never be good enough. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t polite.

  “Mr. Seymour,” I called out, outstretching my hand, “thank you so much for coming.”

  Dressed in a square-shouldered tweed jacket accented with a navy handkerchief, blue oxford shirt, and a brown paisley tie, Mr. Seymour looked up from talking with Lauren, and smiled a tight-lipped smile. I immediately felt self-conscious in my jeans and T-shirt. Covering the last few paces, I reached out to grip his hand and pumped it firmly.

  “And, Mrs. Seymour, as lovely as ever,” I added, turning toward my wife’s mother. She was sitting uncomfortably on a wooden bench beside her husband and daughter, dressed in a brown suit with a matching oversized hat and a thick strand of pearls around her neck. Clutching her purse tightly in her lap, she leaned forward as if to get up.

  “No, no, please, don’t.” I leaned down to peck her on the cheek. She smiled and sat back down on the edge of the bench. “Thank you for coming to spend Thanksgiving with us.”

  “So you’ll think about it?” Mr. Seymour said loudly to Lauren. You could almost make out the layers of ancestry in his voice, thick with both privilege and responsibility, and today, perhaps a little condescension. He was making sure I could hear what he said.

  “Yes, Dad,” Lauren whispered, stealing a glance my way and looking down. “I will.”

  I didn’t take the bait and ignored it.

  “Have you been introduced to the Borodins?”

  I motioned toward the elderly Russian couple that were sitting at the table beside them. Aleksandr, the husband, was already asleep in a lounger, snoring quietly away beside his wife, Irena, who was busy on her knitting.

  The Borodins lived right next door to us. I’d sometimes spend hours listening to Mrs. Borodin’s stories of the war. They’d survived the siege of Leningrad, the modern St. Petersburg, and I found it fascinating how she could have lived through something so horrific yet be so positive and gentle with the world. She cooked amazing borscht, too.

  “Lauren introduced us. A pleasure,” mumbled Mr. Seymour, smiling Mrs. Borodin’s way. She looked up and smiled back, and then returned to her pair of half-knitted socks.

  “So,” I said, spreading my arms, “have you guys seen Luke yet?”

  “No, he’s downstairs with Ellarose and the sitter at Chuck and Susie’s place,” replied Lauren. “We haven’t had a chance to go and see him yet.”

  “But we’ve already been invited to the Met,” said Mrs. Seymour brightly, perking up. “Dress rehearsal tickets for the new Aida performance.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I looked at Lauren and then turned toward Richard, another of our neighbors, who was definitely not on my favorites list.

  “Thanks, Dick.”

  Square-jawed and handsome, he’d been some kind of football star in his Yale days. His wife, Sarah, was a tiny thing, and she sat behind him like a hand-shy puppy. She quickly pulled the cuffs of her sweater down to cover her bare arms when I glanced at her.

  “I know the Seymours love the opera,” explained Richard in his thick-money accent, like a Manhattan stock broker describing an investment option. Where the Seymours were Old Boston, Richard’s family was Old New York. “We have the ‘friends and family’ seating at the Met. I only have four tickets, and Sarah didn’t want to go”—his wife shrugged weakly behind him—“and I didn’t mean to presume, but I didn’t think it was your kind of thing, old boy. I thought I could take Lauren and the Seymours, a little Thanksgiving treat?”

  While Mr. Seymour’s accent sounded genuine, Richard’s faux-British-prep-school affectation grated on my ears.

  “I guess.”

  What the hell is he up to?

  Awkward pause.

  “We need to get going if we’re going to make it,” added Richard, raising his eyebrows. “It’s an early rehearsal.”

  “But we were just about to start serving,” I said, pointing back toward the checker-clothed ta
bles set with bowls of potato salad and paper plates. Tony smiled and waved at me with the tongs while he piled burnt sausage and chicken atop a serving tray.

  “That’s all right, we’ll stop for something,” said Mr. Seymour, again with his tight-lipped smile. “Richard was just telling us about a wonderful new bistro on the Upper East Side.”

  “It was just an idea,” added Lauren uncomfortably. “We were talking and Richard mentioned it.”

  I took a deep breath, balling my hands into fists, but caught myself and sighed. My hands relaxed. Family was family, and I wanted Lauren to be happy. Maybe this would help. I rubbed one eye and exhaled slowly.

  “That’s actually a great idea.” I looked toward my wife with a genuine smile and felt her relax. “I’ll take care of Luke, so don’t hurry back. Enjoy yourselves.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Lauren.

  An inch of gratitude propped our relationship back up.

  “I’m sure. I’ll just grab a few beers with the boys.” On reflection, this was sounding like a better and better idea. “You best get going. Maybe we can meet for a nightcap?”

  “It’s settled then?” said Mr. Seymour.

  Within a few minutes they were gone and I was back with the guys, piling my plate with sausages and rooting around in the cooler for a beer.

  I slumped down in a chair.

  Chuck looked at me with a forkful of potato salad halfway into his mouth. “That’s what you get for marrying a girl with a name like Lauren Seymour.”

  I laughed and cracked my beer open. “So what’s the word regarding this mess between China and India over those dams in the Himalayas?”

  November 27

  THE FAMILY VISIT didn’t go well.

  Thanksgiving dinner started the disaster rolling, first because we ordered a precooked turkey from Chelsea Market—“Oh my, you don’t cook your own turkey?”—and then the awkward dinner seating around our kitchen countertop—“When are you buying a bigger apartment?”—with the finale of me not being able to watch the Steelers game—“That’s fine, if Michael wants to watch football, we’ll just make our way back to the hotel.”