CyberStorm (11 page)

Silence again. We were sitting on barstools, arranged in a semicircle around our black granite kitchen counter. It was as close to a dining room table as we had. I’d festively positioned our little Christmas tree at one end of the counter toward the wall. It glowed in alternating reds and yellows and blues under the overhead lighting. Lauren had lit a few vanilla-scented candles that flickered warmly between us.

“Amen! Let’s eat!” said Chuck with enthusiasm, and the busy noise of humans being human filled the room as we dug into dinner.

I hadn’t felt very hungry, but when the girls had started stacking the kitchen counter with turkey, stuffing, mashed sweet and grilled potatoes, and more, my stomach had begun growling. By the way everyone else was piling their plates high, it wasn’t just me.

“You get to church much these days?” asked Chuck with a smile, pulling off one of the turkey legs. He’d noticed my hesitation when Susie had asked everyone to hold hands to say grace.

He was teasing me.

Church brought to mind memories of bored Sunday mornings when I was a kid, fidgeting with my brothers in the pews. While the minister would drone on about something I didn’t understand, I’d pick at the edges of the threadbare cushions, my little legs swinging above scuffed linoleum floors.

“Maybe this is God’s punishment for the sinners of New York,” joked Chuck as he smothered his plate in gravy. “I’ll bet there are some Amish in Pennsylvania right now who’re getting the last laugh.”

Only half listening to him, I nodded. To my right, Pam was asking Lauren if her family had made their flight to Hawaii. Lauren responded that she thought so, but shrugged, and then Pam asked why we hadn’t gone with them. Lauren hesitated, and then lied, saying that she hadn’t wanted to. Lauren had practically begged me to go.

I wondered if Lauren was telling a white lie to stick up for me, or if she was just too embarrassed to tell the truth. If I’d let her family pay, we might have been a million miles away, watching the drama unfold from some sunny beach, and Chuck would have probably been safely tucked away in his hideaway.

But we were stuck in New York, and it was my fault.

Hearing Luke gurgle on the baby monitor, my stomach lurched and I put down a forkful of turkey.

“Did you manage to get it working?”

“What?”

“The internet, did you manage to get on this afternoon?” asked Rory from across the counter.

It took me a moment to switch tracks.

“Yes, um, well, no,” I stuttered. “I did get on, but it was extremely slow.”

Rory nodded. “The
New York Times
tech group says the internet is totally infected from top to bottom. They’re going to have to switch the whole thing off and restart nodes, one by one, all across the world, like clearing a city house-by-house.”

I nodded, not really understanding.

“Hey, when was the last time you ate meat?” asked Chuck, pointing toward the mock chicken on Rory’s plate. Susie had made some special dishes for them.

“More than a decade,” answered Rory. “I don’t think I could stomach it anymore.”

“Meat
is
murder,” laughed Chuck. “Tasty, tasty murder. You’d be surprised what you can stomach when you need to.”

“Maybe,” laughed Rory back.

“So what are they saying up at the
Times
?” Lauren asked Rory.

“Hey!” said Susie, frowning. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that stuff.”

“I just thought maybe they’d heard something that wasn’t on the news, you know, airplanes…”

The table went quiet.

“Nothing about any air or other transport accidents,” said Rory reassuringly. “But then we’re barely getting any information, and what we are getting is a contradictory mess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even after 9/11, it took a week to figure out what was happening. These cyberattacks look like they’re coming from Russia, the Middle East, China, Brazil, Europe, most even coming from inside the US itself—”

“Enough!” demanded Susie, raising her fork. “Come on now, can we please find something else to talk about?”

“I just—” Rory started to say, but Susie cut him off.

“The power is back on, something I forgot to thank God for,” she continued with a smile, “and all this will probably be over tomorrow and you can talk your heads off about it. But I’d like to have a nice, normal Christmas dinner, so, please.”

“Isn’t this a fantastic turkey?” said Chuck loudly, changing gears. “Come on, a toast to our beautiful wives!”

I raised my glass together with Chuck and Rory.

“To my beautiful wife,” I said to Lauren. She looked briefly at me but then looked downwards. Reaching over, I tried to gently turn her chin toward me, but she shrugged away.

“What is it?” I said softly.

“It’s nothing,” she whispered, meeting my gaze. “Happy Christmas.”

I drank from the glass of wine I’d been holding aloft, but Lauren barely even took a sip from hers.

“A Merry Christmas to you too, baby.”

§

“Just for a minute?” I asked again.

Lauren sighed and picked up a bowl from the soapy kitchen sink water. She began thoughtfully scrubbing it. We’d sent everyone else home, offering to clean up since Susie had provided the whole dinner. We were enjoying a glass of wine by candlelight while we washed up and put everything away.

I wanted to turn CNN on to see what was happening. I’d been itching to turn it back on all night.

“Okay, just for a minute, but I want to talk soon,” she said, looking at me steadily. “We need to talk, Mike.”

That sounded ominous, and I stopped wiping the pot I was drying. After piling my plate with food at dinner, I’d totally lost my appetite and hadn’t been able to eat most of it. Lauren had been quiet, avoiding my eyes, and while she could have just been worrying about her family…

“What do you want to talk about?” I asked, shrugging, trying to sound casual. My scalp began tingling.

She took a deep breath. “Let’s finish cleaning up first.”

I stared at her, holding the pot in one hand and washcloth in the other, but she returned her attention to the sink, scrubbing industriously. Shaking my head, I began stacking the last few pots and pans, put the last glasses into the dishwasher, and then threw the dishcloth onto the counter. Wiping my hands on my jeans to dry them, I picked up the remote.

Lauren sighed loudly again.

Immediately, CNN sprang to life.
“This is only the fourth time the armed forces have been called to DEFCON 3.”

“What in the world?”

I sat down on our couch. Lauren put down the pot she was scrubbing. Images of an aircraft carrier filled the giant screen on our wall. It was one of ours this time.

“The only other times our military have been at DEFCON 3 were the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62, when we were at the brink of nuclear war with Russia—”

“What’s happening?” asked Lauren.

“—the Yom Kippur War of ’73 when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel, nearly triggering another nuclear war—”

“I don’t know,” I replied, shaking my head. Lauren came to sit next to me.

“—and of course, on 9/11, when we were attacked by unknown forces that turned out to be al-Qaeda.”

I started to get up from the couch to go over to Chuck’s place, to see if he knew anything more, but Lauren reached out and stopped me. Without questioning her, I sat down and returned my attention to the TV.

“The only information we are getting is that CENTCOM, one of the US military’s internal command and control communication networks, has been compromised—”

“Mike, could we turn this off for a minute?”

I sat and stared at the TV, trying to understand what was going on. Multiple secret networks had been taken over, from the NSA to forward-deployed military units. They didn’t know the extent of the infection, or the purpose. Our military were readying for some kind of attack.

“Please, Mike,” repeated Lauren after another minute.

I turned to her, shaking my head.

“Are you serious? You want to have a talk now? The world is about to explode and you want to talk?”

Tears welled in her eyes. “Then let the world burn, but I need to talk to you
right
now. I need to tell you something.”

My heart raced. I knew what she was going to say, and I didn’t want to hear it. Containing myself, I stared at her.

“Can’t it wait?” I said, clenching my jaw and shaking my head.

“No.”

Tears were streaming down her face.

“I—” she stammered, “I, um—”

“We have just received an emergency alert from the DHS. Oh my God…”

Lauren and I turned toward the TV. The CNN anchor was at a loss for words.

“…the DHS is reporting multiple unknown and unidentified aerial targets over the continental United States, and is asking the public for any information—”

And then everything went dark.

The background hum of the machines went silent, and I found myself staring into blackness where the CNN anchor had been a split second before. All I could hear was the banging of my own heart and the rush of blood in my eardrums.

Breathlessly, I waited, half expecting the brilliant flash of a thermonuclear explosion to burn through my retinas. But the only thing I heard was the quiet howl of the wind outside while my eyes adjusted to the dim light from the candles still burning on the kitchen counter.

Seconds ticked by.

“Let’s get Luke and go next door, okay?” I said shakily. “Find out what’s going on.”

Lauren grabbed onto my arm.

“Please,” she begged, “I need to get this out.”

“What?” I demanded, my anger and fear boiling over. “You need to come clean right now?”

“Yes—”

“I don’t want to hear this,” I spat back. “I don’t want to hear about how you’re sleeping with Richard, how you’re sorry, how you never meant to hurt anyone.”

She burst into tears.

“You pick
this
moment,” I yelled, “this goddamn moment—”

“Don’t be such an asshole, Mike,” she sobbed. “Please stop being so angry.”

“I’m an asshole? You’re sleeping with someone, and I’m an asshole? I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”

“Please...”

I glared at her, and she stared back at me defiantly.

“WHAT?” I shouted, throwing my hands into the air. Luke began crying loudly in the background.

In the wavering candlelight she put one trembling hand to her mouth and quietly answered me.

“I’m pregnant.”

Day
3 – Christmas Day – December 25

9:35 a
.
m
.

“YOU DIDN’T ASK if it was yours, did you?”

I stopped digging and exhaled slowly.

“You did, didn’t you?” laughed Chuck. “You
are
an asshole.”

My head sagged, and I rubbed my face with one snow-encrusted glove.

“And I mean that in the best possible way, my friend.”

“Thanks,” I sighed, shaking my head, and began digging again.

Chuck leaned through the doorway. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. She’ll forgive you. It’s Christmas.”

I grunted and threw myself into digging out the last few shovelfuls. Pam had wrapped Chuck’s injury, so he had a club for one hand, making him useless for digging.
Just my luck.

“You gotta stop imagining things,” added Chuck, “stop seeing things that aren’t there. That girl adores you.”

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, unconvinced.

It was still snowing, not as hard as yesterday, but still snowing—the whitest of white Christmases that had ever graced New York. Everything outside was covered, and the cars parked down Twenty-Fourth Street were marked by only the barest of lumps in the thick carpet of snow. This silent and blanketed New York was surreal and eerie.

Right after the blackout, we hadn’t seen the glow of mushroom clouds on the horizon, so we assumed the worst hadn’t happened. Chuck, Tony, and I had gone outside and battled our way over two blocks to the Chelsea Piers, straining to see into the snowy blackness above the Hudson. I’d expected to see or hear something, a fighter aircraft battling an unseen foe, but no. After a tense couple of hours, nothing had happened except that the snow had gotten deeper.

The moment the power had gone out, Chuck had fired up his generator. The fiber-optic line from Verizon, that the building had its TV and internet plugged into, should have worked even in a blackout—assuming you could power up your own TV and cable box. When we’d tried CNN, the image and sound had been scrambled for a few hours, and then it went totally blank. It was the same on all channels.

The radio stations were still broadcasting, however, and they were filled with conflicting stories. Some said that the unidentified aerial targets were enemy drones that had invaded US airspace; others said they were missiles and that whole cities had been destroyed.

Around midnight, the president had broadcast a short message saying that there’d been some kind of cyberattack. Its full extent was still being assessed, he said, and they still had no information about the unidentified aerial targets, except that they didn’t have any reports of US cities being physically attacked. He said nothing about drones. Power had been restored to many areas by then; at least that was what the announcement said. We were still without power, however.

“You sure we need to do this?” I asked. “The power came back on yesterday after just a few hours. It’ll probably be back on by this afternoon.”

Chuck had the idea of siphoning gas out of cars on the street. We wouldn’t take it all out of any one car, he reasoned, and they wouldn’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future anyway. We needed more fuel for the generator. Gasoline wasn’t something he’d been allowed to store indoors, and we figured the gas stations would be closed.

“Better safe than sorry, what my granddad always said,” replied Chuck.

While inside this plan had sounded clever, outside it was a different story.