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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s hard to think of all the people and events that put me on the path I’ve taken: my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Burnside, who stoked my desperate need to know where Dick and Spot would run next; the seventh-grade librarian who offered her bemused encouragement when I chose James Clavell’s weighty tome Shogun for my book report; even the swim coaches who demanded that I spend my youth staring at the bottom of a pool with nothing to do but create elaborate fantasies in my head.

  More recently, I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by some of the most talented people in the business. Vince’s editor, Emily Bestler, and his agent, Sloan Harris, are there for me just like they were for him. Simon Lipskar and Celia Taylor Mobley keep the business side humming along. Lara Jones handles the details that constantly get away from me. Ryan Steck lends me his unflagging passion and unparalleled knowledge of the Rappverse. David Brown, already the marketing master, has turned his creativity up to eleven in the time of COVID-19. My mother and wife provide early criticism and remind me when Mrs. Burnside would be disappointed in my grammar. Rod Gregg spends an inordinate amount of time helping me understand the ins and outs of firearms. No small task, I assure you.

  Finally, to all of Vince’s fans who continue to stick with me. It’s hard to believe that this is my sixth Mitch Rapp book. Total Power would have never happened without your continued support and enthusiasm.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The most terrifying thing about writing this book was how little I had to make up. Between actual historical power outages, government assessments of power grid vulnerabilities, and official estimates of the casualties that a long-term outage would generate, much of the book wrote itself. Having said that, things like the details of how attacks would best be carried out and specific locations of critical infrastructure have been purposely obscured or fictionalized.

  PRELUDE

  NEAR FAYETTEVILLE

  WEST VIRGINIA

  USA

  A LIGHT mist condensed on Sonya Vance’s windshield, turning the forested mountains around her into smears of green. Clouds had formed beneath the bridge she was driving across, dense enough that it looked like they would catch her if she jumped.

  Tempting.

  A vehicle appeared on the empty road behind and she examined it in the rearview mirror. A pickup streaked with rust and listing a bit to one side. She slowed to let it pass, examining the young couple and toddler inside. Nothing to suggest a threat. But then, that was how the game was played.

  When her last name had still been Voronova, she’d been taught that everything was a threat. Every kindly old woman could be hiding a blade or vial of poison. Every car could be a tail. Every innocuous knickknack, light fixture, or television could be a recording device.

  Those lessons seemed impossibly remote now. After so many years, even the proper pronunciation of her real name was a challenge that demanded a few stiff drinks to accomplish with flourish. But not vodka. Never vodka.

  * * *

  She’d been born in the Soviet Union to a mother she knew only from a yellowed file presented to her in her mid-teens. It had depicted a hard, bony woman with deep-set eyes that suggested a life of addiction. According to the file, she’d been a thief and a traitor. Perhaps even a murderer. A vile creature willing to do whatever was necessary to get her next fix.

  Over the years, Voronova had come to question whether the woman was really her mother or if that same file had been given to everyone in the program. A lie calculated to foment horror, guilt, and gratitude in whoever heard it.

  She’d been taken from a Romanian orphanage so dystopian that visions of it still came to her in nightmares. Apparently, government testing had discovered early indications of exceptional intelligence and a strong probability that she would grow up physically attractive. Excellent traits for a sleeper agent.

  She’d spent the rest of her youth in a purpose-built town in northern Russia surrounded by children just like her. They’d been raised on a steady diet of English instruction, Western music, and Hollywood movies—all put into ideological context by their ever-vigilant political officer. Many of the others seemed to be genuinely passionate about the endless lectures on the evils of capitalism, the inevitable chaos of democracy, and the absurdity of God. Her enthusiasm, though, had been largely feigned. The bare minimum necessary to get her in front of the latest Tom Cruise movie.

  The Soviet Union had fallen in 1991 when she was still a girl, but the program had continued. The message became less ideological and more nationalist, but it didn’t really matter. She was young and it was all she’d ever known. Like most kids, she’d wanted to please the adults around her, to avoid punishment, and to watch Top Gun.

  She’d been twenty-two years old when she finally crossed into the country she’d spent her life studying. The memory of the experience still clung to her mind. The smell of it. The light of its sun. The warmth of its people. It had felt strangely like… home.

  And so it had been for the last sixteen years. She’d turn thirty-eight next month, assuming she managed to live that long. Her survival was something that she’d taken for granted until a call had come in over a hidden app on her phone. A call she’d convinced herself would never come.

  The GPS built into the rental car’s dashboard demanded that she turn off the highway and she felt a surge of adrenaline not befitting a secret agent. But she wasn’t a secret agent. She was a moderately above-average computer programmer who worked out of a cramped basement flat in Washington, DC. A city that was only a few hours behind her but that right now felt like it might as well have been in another galaxy.

  She suddenly felt completely lost, disoriented to the point that she thought she might have to pull over to the side of the road. What was she even doing here? Everything she’d been told she was fighting for was gone. Russia was now a capitalist country run by a dictator and his court of absurdly wealthy oligarchs. The SVR didn’t even pay her. What money she had came from coding.

  Despite those observations, she obeyed her GPS’s orders and turned onto a steep secondary road. Above all others, that was the lesson that had been beaten into her. Follow orders. You are nothing. A machine cog that either performs its function or is torn out and replaced.

  When the pavement ended, the GPS got confused and began endlessly recommending a U-turn. Voronova shut it off, focusing on the dull hum of the motor and vague slosh of mud beneath the tires. She knew where the critical turn was. But not much else. She was to meet a lone male at a cabin situated near the end of the deteriorating track she was traveling. She was to listen to what he had to say, probe him for any additional information that might be pertinent, and report back to Moscow. The only clue she had as to the subject matter of the meeting was her superiors’ demand that she familiarize herself with the US power grid—a project she’d spent the last five days immersed in. Other than that, only one thing could be said for certain: the person she was on her way to meet was important. The risks of activating an agent like her weren’t something Moscow took lightly.

  The building started to appear, ominous in the mist. It was a basic A-frame that probably dated back to before she was born—a strange teepee of peeling logs and asphalt shingles, fronted by a large porch. Predictabl
y, the shades were drawn, but a little light bled around the edges.

  Voronova was carrying a knife in her boot, but that was her only weapon. She hadn’t fired a gun in almost twenty years and her combat training since arriving in the United States consisted entirely of her Thursday night kickboxing class.

  She felt the fear growing in her and it wasn’t difficult to pinpoint its contradictory causes. First, the most likely: the SVR had decided that people like her were more risk than reward and the house contained an assassin charged with solving that problem. The second was perhaps even more terrifying: that this was a legitimate operation and she was going to survive it.

  After being activated, would it be viable for her to stay in the United States? Would she be called back to Russia? And if she was, what the hell would she do there? Go to work in an SVR office building? Continue coding for US companies? Work at the new Kentucky Fried Chicken on Red Square? How would she reintegrate into a country she’d never really integrated into in the first place?

  Voronova parked and grabbed a jacket from the passenger seat before stepping out in the rain.

  Only one way to find out.

  * * *

  Everything seemed on the up-and-up, but it was hard to know that for sure when the Russians were involved.

  He’d been the one who had dictated the location for this meeting and his iPhone, connected to various cameras in the area, showed nothing suspicious. Pocketing the device, he turned his attention to a gap between the windowsill and shade. He wasn’t sure what to expect, exactly. Maybe a supermodel with one of those big fur hats? An East German shot putter with a tight bun and breath that smelled like borscht?

  The woman coming up the steps, though, looked disappointingly normal. Mid-thirties, with a curvy figure poured into snug-fitting jeans. She had the hood of her coat up, but that didn’t fully hide her attractive, no-nonsense features and a lock of blond hair blown across her forehead.

  Mostly, though, he was amazed that she was actually there. He’d spent the last six months trying to set up this meeting. It had taken hundreds of anonymous exchanges over the Internet to prove that he was real and that he had something they wanted.

  Finally, the day had arrived.

  When she reached the porch, he pulled away from the shade and wiped the sweat from his palms. The time spent chatting up the Russians was actually just a drop in the bucket. It had taken more than five years of relentless work to get him here. But really it was much more than that. In truth, his entire life had been leading him to this place, this moment. And while he believed neither in God nor destiny, he did believe that this was his purpose. That he was meant for greatness. Terrible greatness.

  The rattle of boots on the deck was followed by a knock that was more timid than he’d expected.

  When he opened the door, she stepped in and pulled her hood back. The hair was indeed blond, but with dark streaks. A little edgy, but fitting with features that leaned just a little Asian. Up close, she was hotter than at a distance. Maybe she was there to ply him with her feminine wiles? Not necessary, but certainly welcome as a fringe benefit.

  He realized that they’d been looking at each other for an uncomfortably long time but wasn’t sure what to say. Maybe he should have insisted on some code like in the movies. The wind whistles through the trees. And then she’d reply with something like it comes from the frozen north.

  In the end, she was the first to speak.

  “What do you have for me?”

  No sexy Russian accent. She sounded like she was from DC.

  “What do you know about the power grid?”

  “More than most. But it’s not my area of expertise.”

  He examined her stylish down coat. “What is? Fashion?”

  Her smile was polite, with just a hint of distaste. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that expression on a woman’s face. Or the hundredth.

  “Killing people and disposing of their bodies,” she responded.

  He resisted the urge to step back, trying to discern whether she was joking. Her face had become a dead mask. The only thing she wasn’t able to hide was that she clearly didn’t want to be there.

  “Then I’ll keep it simple,” he said, trying to regain the upper hand. “It’s been called the world’s biggest interconnected machine and that’s probably pretty close to the truth. Call it seven thousand power plants, fifty thousand substations, and two hundred thousand miles of transmission lines.”

  “When I said it’s not my area of expertise, I meant I couldn’t run the grid or fix a broken transformer. Not that I didn’t know what it was. Now why did I come all this way? I hope not to listen to you recite a Wikipedia page.”

  He felt his mouth go dry and covered by walking to the refrigerator for a beer. The landlord had left a six-pack of Bud as a thank-you for renting the place in the off-season.

  “What you don’t know is that it’s a miracle that it even works. It’s made up of more than three thousand different utilities, and it’s governed by more different state and federal organizations than you can count—most of which barely communicate with each other. A lot of the infrastructure is over forty years old and some has been running for the better part of a hundred. It’s an incredible balancing act. Despite all the different components, the demand and supply have to be perfectly matched. When you plug in your hair dryer, the grid has to add just that much power. When you turn it off, it has to shut down that power or move it somewhere else.”

  “Sure, it’s complicated, but the fact is that it does work. Almost flawlessly. And it has for a long time. A lot of it’s also redundant. If any piece—or series of pieces—fails, they can route around them until they’re repaired.”

  “Flawless and redundant,” he said incredulously. “You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid, sweetheart. Think about it. In 2003, we had one of the biggest blackouts in history. Fifty-five million people suddenly lost power. Why? An attack by your friends in Moscow? A nuclear bomb? Geomagnetic storm? Nope. Some power lines in Ohio brushed an overgrown tree. That’s it.”

  “There were other factors that kept them from—”

  “Exactly!” he said, pointing at her with the neck of his beer. “That tree should have tripped an alarm, right? Some power company you’ve never heard of should have seen the problem and routed around it. But there was no alarm. Why? Because of a little software bug. A minor glitch that caused a cascade that shut down the whole Northeast.”

  “Whatever,” she said, clearly unimpressed.

  “That wasn’t a planned, malicious attack, lady. It was a tree branch and a coding error. Now imagine the possibilities of a conscious, coordinated effort. How much damage could be done? How long would it take to get things back online?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No? I do.”

  “So, you’re saying that you’ve figured out how to take out a portion of the US grid and keep it down for a while? It seems—”

  “I’ve figure out how to take down the entire US grid and keep it down for a year. Maybe even permanently if you figure that after about six months there wouldn’t be anyone left alive to work on it.”

  Her expression went from unimpressed to skeptical. “That’s a lot easier said than done. Like you just told me, tens of thousands of moving parts—a lot of them independent from one another.”

  He smiled. “I’m glad you say you know something about the grid. That way you’ll have some inkling of what you’re looking at.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He pointed toward a laptop on the kitchen table. “Go ahead. Check it out.”

  * * *

  Sonya Voronova leaned back in the kitchen chair and stared blankly at the computer screen. After almost forty-five minutes of examination, she’d come to the conclusion that this scrawny sleazebag might actually be telling the truth. Not only did everything seem to be there; it seemed to be there in gory detail. High-resolution photos of more than a thousand critical substations. Compre
hensive schematics of transmission systems including their interconnectivity and weak points. Analysis of software security issues in all the major power companies as well as many of the smaller operators. Exhaustive evaluations of transmission line vulnerabilities—from ones that were too close to trees to ones that had poor seasonal access to ones that were beyond their useful life.

  And she’d barely scraped the surface of what was on this asshole’s laptop. The quality and sheer volume of the data was astounding. Maybe a little too astounding.

  The obvious question was whether it was all bullshit. But even compiling that much convincing bullshit would have been a monumental task. Why bother? He’d have to know that Russian analysts would go through it with a fine-toothed comb before any wire transfers were made.

  “The key to taking down the US grid isn’t in the hardware,” she said, speaking aloud for the first time in almost an hour. “Sure, blowing up some critical substations could do a lot of damage. But it wouldn’t last. The key is SCADA—the supervisory control and data acquisition systems. You’d have to be able to get that level of access in literally hundreds of separate utilities. And just trashing their systems wouldn’t be enough. You’d have to get control. Force their computers to provide fake data to cover up real damage, overload systems, and shut down safeguards.” She turned toward the sofa he was sitting on. “That kind of access just isn’t doable. Sure, you could get into a few utilities the normal way—phishing attacks and such. But hundreds? No way in hell.”

  “No way in hell?” he said, pushing himself off the sofa and approaching. When he stopped in front of her he slid his fingers down one side of her hair. She was too stunned to react other than to just stare. Was this his idea of a come-on? Here? Now? The very idea of touching this creep made her stomach roll over.

  “You heard me,” she said, scooting her chair back and moving her hair out of reach.