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  No answer.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  They drove like that for another twenty minutes. Johnny Cash had just started lamenting his time in Folsom Prison when an incoming call muted him. Rapp shot a hand out and picked up. “Yeah. Go ahead, can you hear me?”

  “Mitch?” Claudia’s voice. “You’re cutting out. Can you—”

  “Hang on.” He put in an earpiece and connected it. “Is that better?”

  “Yes, I can hear you now. Are you all right?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to make it to Cape Town.”

  Rapp swore under his breath. She and Anna were booked on a flight going out in a couple of days.

  “Tell me where you are, Mitch. We’re having a lot of problems with communications and I’m probably going to lose you.”

  “On the road somewhere around Wytheville, Virginia, on my way to Langley.”

  “Don’t go to Langley,” she said. “Irene and her team are relocating to the Seneca bunker.”

  He let out a long breath, but didn’t immediately respond. The government had various doomsday bunkers around the country—some dating back to the Cold War. The Seneca facility was the newest and largest, built to replace Mount Weather.

  “It’s that bad?” Rapp said finally.

  “I’m afraid so. Hold on. Let me see if I can…” Her voice faded for a moment. “There. On your phone’s screen. Can you see it? It’s a view of America from a NASA satellite.”

  An overhead of the country came up and he cocked his head to take it in. Most of the East was dark, but that wasn’t surprising considering the cloud cover. The rest of the country looked a little better with widely scattered pockets of light.

  “Could be worse,” Rapp said. “Seems like there’s enough power still on to work with. FEMA and the military can—”

  “That’s not power,” Claudia interrupted. “Those are fires started by overloaded transformers and transmission lines.”

  Rapp nodded in the darkness of the cab. “What about the other infrastructure we were watching?”

  “Our people stopped two attacks, but both saboteurs were killed. Beyond that, we don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “That on top of whatever physical attacks were carried out, there was a massive cyberattack. Power companies—even minor ones—are either locked out of their systems or can’t trust them. Because of that, we have no idea what infrastructure’s been damaged and what infrastructure is still intact. It’s possible that the entire US grid will have to be physically inspected.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Under ideal circumstances, a year. Under these circumstances maybe never. There isn’t—”

  The line went dead. Rapp waited for a few minutes to see if she could reconnect, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen.

  “We won.”

  Rashad Asfour’s voice had gained a bit of strength. Whether that was because of what he’d gleaned from Rapp’s side of the conversation or the pickup’s heater was up for debate. Probably a little of both.

  “Did you say something?” Rapp said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “Sayid Halabi’s dream has finally come true. Your people will die of cold and starvation. Violence and terror. America’s reign is over. And from its ashes a new caliphate will rise.”

  “Very poetic,” Rapp said, seeing a potential path to getting what he wanted. Not the normal path, but this business was all about flexibility.

  “You’re right, Rashad. You have won. The power’s out all across the country and there are fires burning everywhere. With no electricity, I don’t see how we’re going to put them out. And even if we could, more are going to start. The cities aren’t in flames yet, but they will be. My people aren’t used to using fire for heat and light and they’ll have accidents. The people who stay in the cities will burn. The people who escape them will freeze.”

  “Why are you saying this?” Rashad said, understandably confused by Rapp’s sudden resignation.

  “Because it’s the truth. And because I can still survive this.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Rapp opened the console next to him and pulled out the phone he’d found in Asfour’s backpack.

  “Let’s make a deal,” he said, holding up the device. “You give me your password and I’ll let you die a martyr.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Rashad. Allah’s not going to care. You’ve done his bidding like no one before you. You’ve accomplished what Osama bin Laden and Sayid Halabi never even got close to. America’s done. We’re in the dark and on fire. There’s nothing on this phone that can save us. We both know that. But the government doesn’t. And that means I can trade it to them for a place in one of their bunkers.”

  “No,” he repeated.

  There was a finality to his tone that Rapp recognized well. Asfour wasn’t broken. Not yet.

  He pulled to the side of the dark road and dragged the thrashing terrorist onto the wet asphalt again. Gravity fought against Rapp as he wrestled the man back into the bed of the truck, but when he finally slammed the gate closed, all his stitches were still intact. He leaned over the side, looking into Asfour’s terrified eyes before covering his face again with the tarp.

  “We’ll talk again in an hour or so.”

  CHAPTER 22

  WASHINGTON, DC

  USA

  SONYA Voronova awoke to silence.

  The fan she used for white noise wasn’t running and the comforting red numbers of her alarm clock had disappeared. She rolled over, looking toward the glass doors to the left of her bed. Despite opening onto a high-walled private courtyard, they usually filtered a significant amount of city light. Tonight, though, there was nothing but darkness.

  She felt around for the phone charging on her nightstand, taking a few moments to locate it. Her mind didn’t normally come fully online until after three cups of coffee, but at that moment she felt uncomfortably awake.

  The clock on her cell said 5:12 a.m. More striking was that it had no Wi-Fi connection, no data, and only one bar. She slid out of bed and used the screen’s glow to find her robe. The modest below-street-level flat was cheap to heat so she kept the thermostat set around seventy degrees. It felt noticeably colder than that now, suggesting the power had been out for at least a couple of hours.

  No, no, no, no…

  She sat at a small writing desk and began fiddling with one of the radios that she’d gotten off Amazon. It was quite a piece of survivalist gear for $39.56. Metal exterior, built-in flashlight, waterproof to ten feet. Power could come from batteries, solar, or a hand crank, and all critical bands were covered. The drawback was that all that complexity made it hard to figure out how to turn it on.

  Finally, she stumbled on the right button and was rewarded with the crackle of static. She turned the dial until the hiss was driven back by an official-sounding voice.

  With every word, she felt a little more of her strength drain away. Power was out all across the DC area, with reports of similar outages throughout the country and parts of Canada. The announcer recommended that people stay in their homes and travel only if absolutely necessary. He went on to provide some laughably banal advice about layering clothing and the use of woodstoves. Mostly, though, he just told his listeners to stand by. Government authorities and power companies were working on the problem.

  He’d done it. And not only that, the creepy little psycho had done it on Christmas morning.

  Voronova slipped on a pair of clogs and stepped into her courtyard. The space was no more than thirty feet square with high, windowless walls that were actually the backs of other houses. It was one of the main reasons she’d bought the place—a private and secure oasis in the middle of America’s capital. Sure, it would have been nice to get a little more sun, but when one was a Russian mole, natural light got pushed down the priority list.
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  The cold helped hold back her nausea and clear her mind. But to what end? She’d bought a couple of radios and done a few Sam’s Club runs since finding out about John Alton, but that was it. Procrastination, uncertainty, and a maxed-out credit card had prevented her from buying the solar panels, rainwater collectors, and composting toilet currently cluttering her Amazon cart.

  The irony du jour was that a youth filled with survival training was turning out to be completely useless. Her expertise was disappearing into the mass of humanity that shared the planet with her. Traveling on bogus documents or no documents at all? Piece of cake. Avoiding being tracked by the ever-increasing number of Internet snoops? No problem. Keeping her face obscured from security cameras? Second nature. She’d even been instructed in the fine art of killing silently and disposing of bodies. Though that last one was probably more theoretical than practical. When she found a spider in her house, she tended to capture it and set it free on the front porch.

  So now there she was. Standing in the rain with a kitchen stacked with a maybe a month’s worth of canned food, dried beans, and chocolate pudding. Oh, and a good three months’ worth of toilet paper. That’d be helpful. Because if there was anything starving people were known for, it was their prodigious bowel movements.

  She went back inside, heading straight for her gas fireplace. The pilot was still burning and she activated the battery-operated thermostat. A moment later, the living area was bathed in flickering light and she could feel the warmth on her face. For the moment at least. She’d never been able to find reliable information on what would happen to the natural gas supply in a long-term blackout.

  Might as well enjoy it while it lasted.

  She finally stepped back and turned a full revolution in the tiny room, trying to realistically assess her situation. The front door was metal and the window next to it was protected by bars—widely spaced, but sufficient to stop anyone over four years old. The only other ingress point was her courtyard and the only access would be from the roofs of adjacent houses. Very few people were aware of the existence of her little alcove and it was hard to picture any of them climbing down into it.

  She kept a compact Beretta Px4 and a box of spare rounds in her nightstand, but after those bullets were expended, she’d be down to fighting with kitchen knives. Not ideal.

  Voronova dug through one of her kitchen cabinets, coming up with a roll of black drawer liner, a staple gun, and some duct tape. She dropped the items at the base of the living room window, looking at her reflection in the glass for what might be the last time. Despite her front porch being a protected hollow at the bottom of a set of steps, the light still made its way to the street. If this was John Alton’s blackout, she had to make her home look abandoned—unworthy of the considerable effort it would take to break in.

  She reached for the drawer liner but couldn’t quite bring herself to pick it up. Her adult life had always been one of isolation—either self-imposed or imposed on her. The glass in front of her sometimes felt like her only connection to the world. Cutting that last link was harder than she imagined. So, instead, she just stood there, trying futilely to see past her reflection and into the darkness. The darkness that she’d had a hand in creating.

  Americans were incredibly pampered. Few had ever experienced anything that could be described as real hardship. They had no inkling of what it was like to have to fight for their own survival and the survival of their families. To know that death, and not embarrassment or financial difficulty or loss of social status, was the price of failure.

  She should have done something. She should have stopped this. But how? Even if she weren’t being watched by her Russian masters, what could she have done? Called 911? How would that go?

  Hi, I know a guy who wants to take down the US power grid. Evidence? Of course! I have half of a heavily encrypted hard drive that I got through breaking and entering.

  Or maybe the FBI would have been a better idea. She could have marched down to the J. Edgar Hoover Building and announced that she was a Russian sleeper agent with important information about an imminent terrorist attack. They’d have probably tossed her out of the building, but what if they’d actually taken her seriously? What if she’d managed to convince them of her identity? She saw the outcomes as binary:

  A: Spend the rest of her life being tortured in an undisclosed CIA dungeon.

  B: Get traded for an American agent being held by the Kremlin, then spend the rest of her life being tortured in an SVR dungeon.

  And since neither of those outcomes sounded all that appealing, she was instead going to barricade herself in her little apartment and slowly starve.

  A terrifying end but, in a way, she was glad for her procrastination and lack of available credit. If she’d managed to fill her flat with survival gear, what then? Sit around comfortably while the people she’d condemned died?

  No. This was better. It was what she deserved.

  CHAPTER 23

  NEAR SENECA ROCKS

  WEST VIRGINIA

  USA

  DAWN had broken a few hours ago, but it was hard to tell. The clouds clinging to the mountains were battleship gray and thick enough to keep everything murky. If Rapp’s GPS hadn’t still been functioning, he would have missed his turn off the empty rural highway.

  No-trespassing signs were plentiful on the narrow gravel road, but they weren’t fancy—basically the same beat-up plaques that everyone bought to warn off wayward hunters and partying teens. He wound through a heavily treed canyon for a good five miles before spotting a rusty chain link gate cutting across it. No guard was in evidence, but there was a late-model Toyota Highlander blocking the road about fifty yards in front. It looked to be crammed to the headliner with personal effects.

  As he approached, a man in dark slacks and a rain jacket got out, waving his arms in the air. He was pale, middle-aged, and had a really nice haircut. Something about him looked familiar, but it took Rapp a few seconds to put a name to the face.

  “Thank God,” the man said, putting his hands on the pickup’s sill as it drifted to a stop. “I’ve been out here for hours. The app on my phone won’t open the gate. It says it’s been deactivated. I’m Senator Davis Graves. I need to drive in with you.”

  As part of his pre-op briefing, Rapp had suffered through a seemingly endless video of a recent congressional hearing on the electrical grid’s vulnerabilities. The asshole leaning his wet head through the window was the same one who had insisted the DOE was exaggerating the threat.

  Un-fucking-believable.

  Rapp was accustomed to bad behavior in politicians, but this had to be top five in his career. Graves had fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the government from laying in additional security. And now that America was suffering the consequences of his actions, he thought he should be first in line for protection. Based on the time it would have taken him to pack that much shit into his vehicle and drive there, he must have started ten minutes after the lights went out.

  On the positive side, though, the gate wasn’t opening for him. Had his access been purposely revoked? Had Alexander actually managed to wrap his mind around the seriousness of this situation and what it was going to take to control it?

  Nah. It was probably just a software glitch. But at least it was an entertaining one.

  “Do you know anything about electrical engineering, Davis?”

  “What? No, I—”

  “Can you put out forest fires?”

  “Are you an idiot? I just said I’m a US senator. And I’m telling you—”

  “No, I’m telling you,” Rapp said, the tone of his voice silencing the man. “If you’re a politician, go home and help your constituents. That’s what they elected you for.”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that,” the man said, looking at Rapp like he was something that had just crawled from under a rock. “I paid for this place. I’ve been a member of this country’s government for almost twenty…”

 
Rapp tuned him out. The opportunity to punch a politician didn’t come up every day, but if there was any appropriate moment, this was it. The shit had officially hit the fan and no one seemed to be looking.

  He swung his left fist out and caught Graves full in the mouth. There wasn’t enough leverage available to knock out any teeth, but plenty to send the man stumbling backward. When he hit the icy mud at the edge of the gravel, he fell backward and slid a good ten feet down the slope.

  Rapp gunned the truck around the man’s Highlander and used his phone to open the gate. In the rearview mirror he saw Graves struggle back to the road and start running. It looked like the first time in a while and there was no way he was going to make it. The gate was already sliding back into place.

  As he drove, Rapp wondered idly what would happen to the man. It was fun to think Graves would run out of gas on the way back to DC and freeze to death but it was unlikely. Parasites had an incredible ability to survive. He’d figure out a way to convince someone to help him, use that person up, and then move on to another. It was the way of the world…

  After three more miles he came to another gate. This one looked significantly sturdier and was being tended to by a soldier armed with an M4. Rapp pulled up and passed him an ID card through the open window. Another soldier appeared from a hut near the trees and used a rolling mirror to check the pickup’s underside.

  Not finding any contraband or explosives hidden in the chassis, he turned his attention to the truck’s bed. A moment later, he came alongside his companion for a brief, but urgent, whispered conversation.

  “Sir, there seems to be a man wrapped in a tarp back there.”

  “Yeah,” Rapp agreed.

  “Uh, entry is strictly controlled. Authorized personnel only. That’s you—and according to my orders—only you.”

  Rapp nodded and stepped out of the truck. He leaned over the side and pulled the tarp back from Rashad Asfour’s face.

  “How you doing back here?”

  The man had turned a vague shade of blue over the last hour despite the fact that temperatures had risen to almost forty degrees. He tried to respond but his words were unintelligible.