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  Janice Crane wasn’t exactly Albert Einstein, but she did have a master’s in physics and a fair amount of knowledge about the grid. The black guy next to her screamed tech wizard and didn’t look like someone you could just bullshit. Any obvious lies or spin could bring suspicion down on him. Better to earn their trust by throwing them a few bones. Those bones would have to be chosen carefully, though.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said, realizing that he’d been silent for too long. “Obviously, most of my recommendations are out of the question if you’re looking for cheap and cheerful. The biggest bang for your buck would be to create a set of standardized procedures to allow the individual companies to do a security survey of their own systems. Global password changes, firewall upgrades, scans for malware, that kind of thing. It’s not too intrusive and I’d be…” His voice faded for a moment. He’d been about to say “Happy to help,” but that would sound suspiciously agreeable to Crane. “Willing to extend my contract to help set that up if you want. The hard part would be persuading them to do it. Those companies don’t like spending time and money on stuff like this.”

  “You let us worry about persuasion,” Kennedy said. “Now, what about physical infrastructure? We infer from your report that in order to carry out a truly devastating attack, cyber wouldn’t be enough. Some critical substations would also have to be destroyed.”

  Shit. She really had read his report.

  “Yeah, but you asked for quick and easy and that’s neither. I mean, sure, some substations are more important than others—if you picked just the right ones, you’d only have to take out nine to put the whole country in the dark. But as you add more attacks you have more choices. For instance, if someone had the capability to take out fifteen substations instead of nine, the number of permutations goes up to over a hundred.”

  The man from the motel finally broke his silence and everyone seemed content to defer to him. “I need the locations of the twenty most critical by the end of the day. By tomorrow, I want the top two hundred and fifty.”

  Two hundred and fifty? Fuck.

  Alton wanted to say it was impossible, but Crane would know that was a lie and this asshole didn’t look like someone who took no for an answer.

  “Sure. Yeah. No problem.”

  When Alton fell silent instead of offering more, his boss spoke up. “And what about the manufacturing facilities that make transformers, John? Wouldn’t we want to take a look at protecting those?”

  Bitch.

  “Yeah, but most of them aren’t in the US.”

  His idea was to attack some of the domestic capacity in maybe a third or fourth wave—if he still had the manpower—but now that plan was going down the toilet. He wondered idly if ISIS had assets in Europe. Maybe it would make sense to get them to attack the foreign factories.

  “Why don’t you send us a list of those, too, then,” Kennedy said. “And go ahead and include foreign manufacturers.”

  These two bitches were really starting to chap his ass. All this planning and now he was going to have to make modifications on the fly. That kind of seat-of-the-pants crap just introduced more complexity into something that was already hopelessly complex…

  CHAPTER 16

  FAIRFAX STATION

  VIRGINIA

  USA

  SONYA Voronova glanced at the Timex on her wrist.

  7:32 a.m.

  The neighborhood slowly gaining detail through her windshield was pretty much what she expected of a posh Washington suburb. The homes were overly large, with ample yards and historic flourishes designed to camouflage bland McMansion bones.

  The one she was interested in was across the street and two houses up—a brick monstrosity with a grand glass entrance and newly blacktopped driveway. Based on an earlier recon, the fenced backyard was dog-free and accessed by a single gate secured with a Master model M175DLH padlock.

  A woman jogging through the semidarkness became visible on the opposite sidewalk, and Voronova studied her features for a moment. It was a habit she couldn’t break. There had been eight other children trained with her in Russia and she assumed that at least a few of them were living similar lives somewhere in America. Her brain told her it was pointless, but her heart told her something different. If she could spot one—even just a brief glimpse—maybe some of the loneliness that plagued her would dissipate.

  Or maybe not.

  The bottom line was that she was alone in the world—a realization that had been driven home like never before in the time since her return to the United States. She’d pretty much given up sleeping in favor of her new obsession with the electrical grid. She’d read old newspaper articles on blackouts around the world, surfed endless websites on the subject of long-term failures, and become hooked on the TV show Doomsday Preppers.

  And then it had happened. She’d been clicking through Web pages relating to grid vulnerabilities when she’d come across an article about a recent congressional hearing on that very subject. Thinking she might be able to download a preliminary report, she’d followed a link to a Washington Post article that included a photo of the hearing.

  And there he was.

  Of course, she’d immediately slammed her laptop shut. It didn’t take long for her curiosity to get the better of her, though. The next day, she’d found herself at the public library, using an anonymous computer to dig deeper. And now she was sitting in a rented car, wearing a blond wig and a pair of prosthetic teeth that changed the shape of her face.

  Another fifteen minutes passed with no change other than a slight increase in the frequency of dog walkers. Finally, at 8 a.m. on the dot, the garage door on the house she was watching started to rise. A Porsche sport-utility vehicle backed into the street and she focused on the man behind the wheel.

  John Alton.

  She’d known it would be him, but actually seeing his profile filled her with emotion. Fear? Check. Dread? Check. Excitement? Maybe. Was that the same as an overwhelming urge to throw up?

  The Porsche sped away and she let another minute or so pass before glancing at the laptop in her passenger seat. A spinning icon dominated the center of the screen, but then disappeared and was replaced by a pulsing smiley face. The program had captured John Alton’s garage door opener code and sent it to a companion app on the burner phone she’d bought.

  Still, she just sat there. Motionless.

  “Do it!” she said after a few more seconds of inaction. Her shaky voice filled the car but it wasn’t sufficient to motivate her. Repeating the sentiment in Russian seemed to help. It sounded more official that way.

  Finally, Voronova stepped from the vehicle and walked quickly to the back. In the trunk next to the bolt cutters she wouldn’t be needing were a mop and cleaning supplies. Not sexy, but that was the point. Laborers tended to be invisible to people who lived in these kinds of neighborhoods.

  She used her phone to open Alton’s garage door and walked casually inside before closing it again. There was no evidence that he had an alarm system and there was no keypad near the unlocked door leading to the mudroom.

  After stashing her cleaning supplies in a cabinet, she penetrated deeper into the house. The living room looked even less used than the granite, mahogany, and stainless steel kitchen. She peeked in the pantry and fridge, then conducted a quick sweep of the entire house. One of the bedrooms had been converted to an office and there was a MacBook Pro sitting on the desk. She turned it on and was faced with a login screen.

  In all likelihood it wouldn’t be 123456, so she connected her phone to one of the ports and started an app designed to clone the hard drive. While it ran, she went through what documents she could find, but there weren’t many. Alton appeared to be a man who organized his life in electronic pulses and not dead trees.

  With nothing else to do, she went to the master bedroom for a more thorough search. Besides the office, it was the most lived-in place in the house but still there wasn’t much of interest. An improbably tall stack of science-orient
ed magazines by the bedside, a modest amount of cash tucked away in his underwear drawer. A huge TV with an Xbox.

  What stood out wasn’t what the house contained, it was what it lacked: the equipment and supplies necessary for survival. Where were the guns and power backups? Where was the water and freeze-dried food? If he did this thing, it wasn’t just going to be other people freezing their asses off in the dark. It was going to be him, too.

  The drive cloning software was at seventy-nine percent when an unmistakable sound floated up from the first floor. The front door opening.

  She dropped to her knees and crawled back into the office, snatching her phone from the laptop. Who was it? A real maid? Had Alton forgotten something and come back? Did he have an alarm system she didn’t know about?

  She slithered on her stomach back out onto the landing. Through the railing, she caught a glimpse of Alton looking carefully around the living room. His body language answered her question. She’d missed an alarm. But if that was the case, what kind? Had it been on the door? Were there motion detectors? Cameras?

  After a moment of indecision, she crawled back to the master bedroom and pulled the stack of magazines off the nightstand, carefully arranging them on the floor as though they’d fallen. An earlier search beneath his bed had turned up a loose arrangement of the same kind of junk that migrated under everyone’s bed. She dug some of it out as the footsteps downstairs went silent. Either he’d moved out of earshot or he was coming up the carpeted stairs.

  Voronova slipped beneath the bed and surrounded herself with Alton’s disused possessions. If the house had sensors on the doors, he might just chalk an alarm notification up to a malfunction. If it was motion detectors, the magazines might fool him. If it was cameras, she was screwed.

  Another minute passed before he entered the room—just long enough for her to find and close her hand around something hard. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was the only thing that felt even remotely like a weapon. She forced herself to stay motionless as he knelt next to the bed, trying not to think about the fact that she was probably holding the handle of a feather duster.

  There was a shuffling of papers as he gathered the magazines off the floor. The breath was trapped in her chest as she strained to hear his movements. Finally, muffled footsteps. Receding.

  His gait had lost some of its earlier uncertainty. And not a moment too soon. She was getting light-headed. The air flowed quietly from her lungs and she inhaled cautiously as his feet hit wood. A few seconds later, a door closed. She pushed a neatly folded sweatshirt away from her ear and once again strained to hear. After a few seconds, the sound of a well-tuned engine became audible and then faded away.

  Voronova glanced at the glowing hand of her watch and then let the side of her face sink into the carpet. She’d stay put for an hour. If he got another notification, hopefully he’d assume it was another false alarm. And even if he didn’t, his office was a good forty minutes away with traffic. She’d have plenty of time to retrieve her mop and get the hell out of there.

  Right?

  CHAPTER 17

  WEST OF MANASSAS

  VIRGINIA

  USA

  “IT says beans,” Anna reported. “That’s about a hundred boxes of them at least! You must really like beans. They’re gross.”

  “I like lamb,” Rapp replied.

  “I told you, my sheep are pets! You can’t eat them! And Snowpuff loves you! That’s why she follows you around and gets sad when you go on trips and stuff.”

  “Write it down,” Rapp said, punching his code into a closet containing weapons. “We need a good inventory of what we’ve got and what we still need.”

  The safe room they were in was the most secure place in a house that he’d designed entirely around security. The fact that the structure was elegantly postmodern and decorated in the always popular price-is-no-object style was entirely the doing of the architects, designers, and women in his life. All he cared about was reinforced concrete walls, blast-proof glass, and self-sufficiency.

  He had electrical generation from both solar and wind, a subbasement full of Tesla batteries, and diesel generators fed by a massive underground tank. Water was courtesy of a well that would be virtually impossible to tamper with. Air in the safe room was filtered against all known toxic agents.

  The remote mountaintop subdivision had initially been owned by his brother, who had eventually given all the lots away to people loyal to Rapp. So now he wasn’t just surrounded by concrete and steel, but by shooters he trusted.

  “Another box of beans,” Anna said. Boredom was starting to overcome the disgust in her voice.

  “You know the drill,” Rapp said. “Mark it and move it.”

  “Why don’t we go look at our presents under the tree and try to guess what they are instead.”

  “Why don’t you just wait a few days until you can open them? Then you’ll know for sure.”

  “But this is boring and we’ve been down here forever.”

  “It’s been fifteen minutes.”

  She groaned dramatically and began pushing the box across the floor.

  The problem he was in the process of correcting was that he’d recently modified the space to handle a biological attack by Sayid Halabi. But with the man’s corpse now rotting in the Somali desert, some of the changes were counterproductive. Everything needed to be retooled with a long-term grid failure in mind.

  A woman’s voice drifted down to them. “Anna! Are you in there?”

  The question came in Claudia Gould’s native French but Anna’s answer was in English. It had become a battle of wills between her and her mother.

  “I’m helping Mitch!”

  Claudia appeared in the steel threshold a moment later wearing formfitting jeans and a silk blouse that clung in just the right places. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing flawless skin and dark, almond-shaped eyes. In many ways, she seemed the perfect opposite of Rapp. His face was lined from too many years under the Middle Eastern sun, his hair and beard existed at the very edge of control, and he owned a total of three pairs of nontactical pants. The relationship was working, though. And not just for him. Her takeover of logistics for Scott Coleman’s company had gone even better than expected. Coleman could now focus entirely on operations and his profits were up thirty percent.

  “You promised you’d get the barn ready,” Claudia said, sticking to French. “The meeting is in two hours and there are animals everywhere.”

  “But Mitch needs me!”

  “He can manage on his own. Now go.”

  “You’re always bossing me around!” she said, displaying a temper that would soon be hard to deal with.

  He watched her stomp off, and felt the now-familiar twinge of fear when he thought about how reliant he was on the two of them. He’d finally managed to fill the emptiness of his life, but at the price of constant worry. As ulcer-inducing as it was, though, it was an improvement. And not a small one, either.

  “Is all this rearranging really necessary, Mitch? I think the only thing we’re not prepared for is an alien invasion.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got a roof mount for the minigun. We can handle aliens.”

  She smiled and took a seat on a box. “Well, I never have to worry about being unprepared, that’s for certain.”

  “No, you definitely aren’t going to have anything to worry about.”

  She picked up on his tone and her smile faded. “What does that mean?”

  “It means you and Anna are going to your house in Cape Town. I got you first-class tickets for after Christmas.”

  “Why? Wait. Don’t tell me. Because there’s a threat to America, right? There’s always a threat, Mitch. We didn’t leave when Sayid Halabi was trying to wipe out half the world’s population with a coronavirus. Why would we leave now?”

  When Rapp’s wife died, his life had transformed into a simple one of barking orders and having those orders followed to the letter. He
had to constantly remind himself that it was different at home. Explanations and compromise were how things got done.

  “Because this is different, Claudia. That threat wasn’t specific to the US and you were running logistics for our entire operation.”

  “Look, I understand the ramifications of a countrywide grid failure, but if this house is built for anything, it’s built for that.”

  “Maybe. But why would I put you and Anna through something like that for no reason? You could be holed up here for the better part of a year. And when you’re finally able to leave, there won’t be much of America left. You have a house in South Africa and they aren’t all that heavily linked to the US politically or economically. They’ll still take a big hit—the whole world will—but it’ll be less than a lot of other places.”

  “What if you need my help?”

  “Then I’m better off with you there. What can you do for me from Virginia? No Internet. No way to move around. Communications down nationwide. You’d actually have more capabilities from Cape Town.”

  She didn’t respond, instead staring straight ahead. Beneath her warmth and humor was a core of calculation. It was what made her so good at her job. And it was what would eventually force her to admit that he was right.

  * * *

  Weightless flakes of snow swirled around Rapp as he walked down the empty street. The barn that was his destination served the entire subdivision and his initial plan had been to turn it into a gym. Unfortunately, by the time he was ready to start work, the space was overrun by Anna’s collection of farm animals. She had Scott Coleman wrapped around her little finger and the herd seemed to grow under the cover of darkness or when Rapp was out of the country.

  He’d been about to put a stop to it but was now reconsidering. While an elaborate gym would be a nice thing to have, livestock had an undeniable upside. While he wasn’t as opposed to rehydrated beans as Anna, he also wasn’t opposed to lamb chops and chicken wings.