The Cyclops Initiative (3 page)

A slide came up on the screen showing a pile of garbage that looked harmless enough, just as she'd described it.

“Radioactive particles can adhere to this material, so it needs to be disposed of carefully. But apparently some nuclear plant somewhere didn't feel like paying to do that. So instead they just stuffed it in a cargo container and sent it overseas. Most likely it was being shipped to a developing country where it would end up in a landfill. This happens with distressing regularity. Along its journey, however, it passed through our port. That's illegal—­hence the counterfeit paperwork. Just before six
A.M.
, this cargo container entered an inspection station in the Port of New Orleans. It went under a PVT gamma ray detection arch, a piece of technology we've installed in all our shipping hubs specifically to catch this kind of event. The arch did its job and logged a gamma ray detection event. Normally the cargo container would have been isolated in a quarantine facility and traced back to its origin. Today, however, we never got the chance.”

Foster clicked her remote again. The image on the screen changed to show a Predator UAV—­an aircraft everyone in the room would instantly recognize.

“At the same time an MQ-­1 aircraft was passing overhead. It was an old, demilitarized model, one of the first-­generation drones. Civilian agencies and even law enforcement are using these now for basic surveillance functions. Local air traffic control was aware of the Predator, but nobody seems to have raised any red flags—­they assumed it was a routine sweep. The port is monitored at all times by a variety of systems, including drones, and while this one didn't have an official flight plan, everyone seems to have assumed that was just an oversight. Now, these drones don't just fly themselves. Somebody has to actively control them from another location. So we know what happened next was not just a glitch.

“The drone descended at speed toward the port facility just as the cargo container passed under the PVT arch. It impacted the container with a considerable amount of force. The drone wasn't carrying any weaponry, but simple physics was enough to catastrophically damage the cargo container. Its structural integrity was compromised and its contents were dispersed over a wide area. Some of the nonmetallic components inside, like those rubber gloves, were aerosolized in the impact.

“What that means is that a large quantity of radioactive material was dispersed across the port facility, in some cases traveling a quarter mile before it settled out of the air. Dust from the gloves and clothing may have been carried much farther. Preliminary analysis shows that a significant area of the port has been affected.”

She clicked a button and a new picture came up, this showing an overhead view of the enormous port facility. A red stain covered almost half of the view, looking like a spray of blood from a cut artery, to indicate the spread of radioactive material.

“The port was evacuated just after the event. There was only one direct injury—­a Charles Mitchell, the operator of the PVT arch, was hit by flying debris. He was found dead on the scene. Meanwhile, we have hazmat crews all over the port trying to collect as much of the debris as possible. Though the overall levels of radiation are very low, it just isn't safe to let workers back inside the facility until we can complete our cleanup.”

She clicked her remote and the view returned to the video Chapel had seen before—­the dust-­shrouded pile of cargo containers.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Foster said, “Mr. Secretary. The impact—­the crash—­of this drone was intentional. It was very well planned. What it boils down to is that terrorists have just exploded a dirty bomb on American soil.”

FORT BELVOIR, VA: MARCH 21, 09:34

Half the room started talking at once then, ­people firing questions at Melinda Foster, others calling for immediate action. Chapel couldn't follow all the rapid-­fire discussions, and apparently neither could the room's most important occupant.

The secretary of defense slapped the table with the flat of his hand. It was enough to get absolute, instant quiet.

In the silence he looked around the room, from one tense face to another. “The president has personally asked me to lead the task force on this. The director of national intelligence is on board—­so all you civilians here, you're working for me now. Everybody here is working for me until this is over. Understood?”

The room rumbled with agreement. There had been times in the past—­September eleventh, for example—­when the various agencies in the intelligence community had failed to work together and bad things happened. Clearly the president wasn't going to let that happen again. The authority he'd given to Norton might be unprecedented, but nobody in that room was going to question it.

“We're going to get whoever did this,” Norton said. “We're going to make an example of them.”

The room briefly erupted in a chorus of assent, which stopped as soon as Norton slapped the table again.

“No one is leaving this room until we have a plan for moving forward. I need all of you working together—­every agency, every organization, from this moment, is going to make this their top priority. What we're talking about here is escalation. This is terrorism of a kind we haven't seen before and we're not going to let it get out of control. The world needs to know we won't allow this to happen again. First things first, though. We need to know who's responsible.” He turned and looked at one of the civilians—­one Chapel didn't recognize. “CIA. What groups do we think are even capable of something like this? Hijacking a Predator—­could al-­Qaeda do that? IS? The Khorasan Group?”

The civilian grimaced. “They've never done anything like it before. They stick to low-­tech methods, mostly. But we can't rule them out. A Predator is like any other machine. It's designed to accept input from a remote user and it doesn't care who that user is as long as they're broadcasting on the right frequency, with the right encryption. It's not smart enough to ask why it's being told to do something.”

“But our encryption is the best in the world,” the SecDef insisted. Norton looked to another man halfway across the room. “NSA. Am I wrong in believing that?”

“No,” the NSA director replied, though he looked a little dubious. “Our stuff should be uncrackable. But we can't rule out the possibility that some very smart hacker in, say, Indonesia or Taiwan discovered a new exploit or just got lucky or—­”

Norton shook his head. “I'm hearing a lot of qualifiers. A lot of ‘we can't rule this out.' I want real answers. Have we picked up any chatter about this? Anybody talking about planning an operation with a Predator drone, anyone discussing a cargo container full of radioactive waste?”

“Nothing,” the NSA man said. “The terror groups have been quiet lately. Most of what we hear is about money problems and recruiting. Nothing like this.”

“At least that's definite,” Norton replied. “Okay. Let's hear from the military. Who did this Predator belong to?”

“That would be us,” an air force general said. “It was one of our fleet. I've taken the liberty of tracking it through the system, and I can have a document on your desk tomorrow showing every individual who's ever flown it, maintained it, or inspected it. I can tell you right now that it's been sitting in a hangar for the last year, under armed guard the whole time. It hadn't been modified or repaired for nine months. Nobody physically altered it.”

“What was it doing in the air?”

The general looked like he very much wanted to shrug. But he must have known this wasn't the time to admit he didn't know something. “It was signed out last night, by official e-­mail. Fueled up and launched just after midnight, eastern time.”

“By whom? Who signed it out?” Norton demanded.

“The CIA,” the general replied.

That started some real shouting. ­People visibly moved away from the CIA director, who kept waving his hands in the air demanding quiet, insisting he had a response.

“I guarantee you we did not sign out that drone,” he shouted over the babble. “Whatever paperwork the air force got was a forgery. Drone operations have to cross my desk, and I saw nothing like this. Whoever these terrorists are, they have access to CIA watermarks, that's all, they have—­”

“Sir,” a navy admiral said, raising his voice, “if we can't figure out who it was, why don't we just hit them all—­punitive raids, keep up the pressure until one of the terrorist groups cracks—­”

“That's going to kill our reputation overseas,” one of the civilian directors insisted. “It's going to make it impossible for our ­people on the ground to—­”

“We can afford to lose some human assets,” the CIA director insisted, “if it means flushing these assholes out of hiding; I'm willing to sacrifice as much as half of my—­”

“You're talking about mobilizing every Special Forces group,” an army general shouted, “right at the worst possible time, when things in Syria are going to hell and we need more ­people than ever in Yemen—­”

“Ah,” someone said, a quiet sound in the furor. “If I may.” No one paid any attention.

Nobody except the SecDef. He turned and looked straight at Rupert Hollingshead.

Little by little the noise dropped away. ­People noticed that Norton had switched focus, and they decided they needed to know why.

Hollingshead leaned back in his chair and cleaned his glasses with a pocket handkerchief. He made a flourish of the cloth, then stuffed it back in his breast pocket while we waited for the room to quiet down so he could be heard.

“Rupert?” Norton asked. “You have something?”

“I am hearing,” Hollingshead said, rising creakily to his feet, “a lot of sabers being rattled just now. A lot of ­people who wish to go and find and lynch every known terrorist just in case one of them was responsible.”

He smiled. It was his warmest, most genial smile, and Chapel knew it was one hundred percent fake. “Understandable, of course.”

“Clearly you disagree with that plan,” Norton said.

Hollingshead gave a contrite shrug. “I think it may be presumptive. A tad.” He walked across the room, over to the screen that still showed dust billowing around cargo containers, as if he'd noticed something there. He blinked through his spectacles at the image. “Since, after all, this was not a terrorist attack.”

FORT BELVOIR, VA: MARCH 21, 09:49

The CIA director actually started laughing.

“What are you talking about?” the NSA director shouted. “Of course it is! Somebody hit us, some cowardly bastard who—­”

Hollingshead lifted his hands in the air as if in surrender. Chapel knew his boss was just getting started, though. “Please. Just hear me out. We few, gathered here today, have been preparing for something like this ever since 2001. We have lost a great deal of collective sleep over the possibility of a dirty bomb attack. In all our scenarios and projections we imagined this as the worst possible way for terrorists to strike at us. And so we built up our defenses against such a thing. We organized all our efforts toward preventing any terrorist group getting their hands on nuclear material. But that's just it, isn't it? When one is in possession of a, um, hammer, well, every threat looks exactly like a nail.”

Norton's brow furrowed. “Rupert, if you could get to the point soon, I'd appreciate it.”

Hollingshead smiled and even elicited a few sympathetic chuckles from the crowd. They weren't quite enough to balance the glares he was getting from the CIA and NSA directors.

“Very well. I'll give you three points, in fact. One. A terrorist attacks a public target. A visible target. Ms. Foster,” he said, turning to the woman who'd given the initial briefing, “have the gentlemen of the press been allowed into the port facility since the attack?”

Foster looked terrified at being called on. “No,” she said, “not . . . not as such. There have been some reporters out there—­they saw the plume of dust—­but they don't know any details. The port's security ­people told them it was a hazardous materials situation, but that was all. No specific facts.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Very well done. Best we don't bring this to the public just yet. The port facility is off-­limits to the public. Point one. Terrorists wish to gain media attention, to get the world to see what they've done. A terrorist attack is a
statement,
a message everyone has to listen to. At the moment, the net result of this attack is likely to be a two-­minute segment on the local news broadcast in Louisiana. Not much of a coup.

“Point two: they always take credit. We've already heard there was no chatter about this. But that must also mean no one is crowing about their success. What terrorist group would be so tight-­lipped?”

Norton looked like he was half convinced. “What's your third point?”

Hollingshead nodded. “Subtlety. And intentionality. This attack wasn't just meant to scare us. It was meant to quietly, but quite effectively, cripple us. Mister Secretary,” he said, blinking at a man who sat very close to the SecDef. Chapel realized after a second that he recognized the man—­he was the secretary of transportation. Not somebody who would normally sit in on a top-­level intelligence briefing. “You are here today because your office administers and oversees our port facilities, yes? Perhaps you can tell me what I need to know. How vital to American commerce is the Port of New Orleans?”

The secretary nodded, clearly excited to be included. “It's one of our top priorities. Our only deepwater port with access to six railways, the highway system, cargo planes. Half of all our food travels through that port, every year.”

“I imagine that closing the port is going to cost us a great deal of money, even in the short term,” Hollingshead pointed out.