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“Thank you,” Mike said. “Oh, yes, I believe Nicholas loves oatmeal. Instant would be great for him.”
Smiles, a crack of laughter, then Savich said, “You’ll find info in your e-mails.” He handed them two manila folders. “In here you’ll see the breakdown of Richmond’s security systems. Thankfully, they did a risk assessment only three months ago. Juno did the work, and they’re one of the best cyber-firms in the U.S.”
“I’m familiar with them,” Nicholas said.
Mike nodded.
Savich said, “They beefed everything up. However, I’m thinking if there’s an attack under way, perhaps there was a worm already inside the system, put in before they made the changes.”
Nicholas frowned. “That would mean Juno didn’t do a thorough job. If the worm was already inside, then their security measures should have picked up an anomaly.”
He flipped through the information while Savich continued to explain to Mike and Sherlock, “No matter how or when, if the bug was introduced into their systems, we won’t have long to stop the attack. You’re better at this than I am, Nicholas, and you’ve already stopped them once. That makes you better equipped to deal with this than our people. So get out your laptop.”
Not two minutes later, The Who belted out “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Savich listened, punched off. “Official confirmation, the power grid’s down in Richmond. Nicholas, go.”
Nicholas quickly accessed the servers at Dominion Virginia Power and hit a solid firewall. “Okay, so far, Juno does know their stuff.” He looked up, grinned, flexed his fingers, and started to code.
Within moments he’d tuned the rest of the room out completely. The code he was bumping up against was not only sophisticated, it was familiar. He found a back door to the server, something the original company that had developed the security system had given themselves to try and stop exactly the kind of attack they were experiencing.
“Ah,” he said aloud, “here we have a line of self-written code, and wouldn’t you know it—there’s Gunther’s signature. At least I know how to disable it.” Nicholas uploaded his own worm to disengage the attack, then sat back and let it run. “That’s the best I can do by myself.”
Savich said, “First, Nicholas, tell me how Gunther did it, then I’ll call our tech team.”
Nicholas said, “This attack is a DDoS, which as you know means distributed denial-of-service, which normally only disables the company’s website and replaces it with a message, and people can’t log in. But this one, it’s very advanced. The attack vector has taken down their security grid by installing malware to allow remote control of the power system. Malware, according to the signature, purchased from our buddy Gunther Ansell. The positive here, and you can tell your tech team this, is that I didn’t see any excessive activity, a good thing. If they were trying to shut everything down, there would be more movement, the code shifting, being rewritten in an attempt to eliminate my uploads to stop it.
“They may think Gunther’s code is enough to disable the power grids, or they could be waiting for the attack to crawl through everything before they play with the lights. I put up some firewalls, hopefully to stop them before they do.”
Savich nodded. “Okay, good, let me call the team, tell them what you said.”
Sherlock said, “Nicholas, you talked to FedPol about Ansell’s death?”
“Yes. Our friend Pierre Menard was going to take over the investigation, but we haven’t heard from him in several hours.” He glanced at his screen, made a few adjustments to his code. “This isn’t exactly the same type of attack as the oil companies—it’s not downloading financial and intellectual information, but it is similar. With Gunther’s signature again, I’d say it’s probably COE.”
“Of course it’s got to be COE,” Sherlock said. “Who else could it be?”
51
PAWN TO H3
Mike looked at each of them in turn. “Yes, it’s COE. After Bayway, who knows what they’re after? They are trying to take down the Richmond grid for a reason. It’s up to us to figure out what that reason is.”
She picked up a paperweight off Savich’s desk, passed it from hand to hand. “What I find amazing with this escalation is that COE has lost two important members in that fire in Brooklyn—Ian McGuire, the IRA bomber, and Vanessa Grace, bomb builder and undercover CIA. And don’t forget the Middle Eastern man working with them. Who is he and what is his expertise? What is his purpose being with them? With the losses, it’s amazing they’ve continued, much less escalated.”
An agent appeared in the doorway, a manic grin on his face.
“Good news, Davis?” Sherlock asked him.
Savich said, “Agent Davis Sullivan, meet Agent Mike Caine, and you already met Nicholas Drummond. Why are you grinning like a fool?”
“Our firebug in Brooklyn. Louisa Barry identified his ass. Smart girl, she put the accelerant signature into the databases. After lots of integration and inputting data into ViCAP, she identified our firebug as one Andrew Tate, twenty-seven, first convicted of setting a string of fires around a high-end housing development under construction outside Seattle when he was only thirteen. Caused millions in damage. He went to juvie for four years, got out, then quickly went back in when some cars along a ‘peaceful protest’ route ended up on fire.
“And catch this, guys, while Tate was behind bars, he took several computer classes. The teacher marked in his record that he was amazing, a natural, outstripped him—the teacher—in weeks.
“Too bad, but this doesn’t tell us where he is now. His last known is a Seattle halfway house. He bolted on his parole in 2010, has been off the books since. I’m afraid that’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
“This is great, Davi
s,” Nicholas said, “and it explains a whole lot. I think you and Louisa not only found our firebug, we also found COE’s hacker.”
