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  He dropped to the mud as flaming parts of the car—and of the men who had been inside—came raining down around him.

  “Mas, you all right?”

  “Not a scratch. You?”

  Rapp didn’t answer, instead struggling to his feet and walking out to where the fire was starting to melt the asphalt. The force of the first explosion was such that a secondary was unlikely. Still he was getting too close. The heat from the flames was like a drug, though. It penetrated him, pushing back the numbness that had now taken over almost his entire body. He stared into the flames, strangely mesmerized.

  They hadn’t wanted to be identified. That’s why they’d kept the masks on. Their goal had been to tie Rapp up here and then kill themselves in a way that would preclude a conclusive ID. To provide Rapp with the illusion that he’d taken out Muhammad Nahas and his technology expert, when in fact they had used the time to escape.

  Maslick appeared from the trees but stayed well back from the burning vehicle. “What the fuck are you doing, Mitch? Get away from there!”

  Rapp tried to take a step back, but his legs collapsed beneath him. A few seconds later, Maslick had him under the arms and was dragging him away from the fire.

  “It wasn’t them,” Rapp said, his voice sounding oddly distant. “Tell our people that Nahas and his man are still out there.”

  “Fred!” he heard Maslick say into his comm. “We need a medevac. Call ahead to the closest hospital and give them our ETA. Tell them we’ve got a gunshot wound with heavy blood loss. O-positive. Do it now!”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  USA

  MITCH Rapp gave a quick knock on the Oval Office door and then entered. Everyone standing in the conversation area turned toward him and all the faces were familiar: CIA director Irene Kennedy, who had recruited him as a kid; her counterpart at the FBI, Darren Phillips; James Templeton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and a wild card he hadn’t seen in years—TJ Burton, the head of FEMA. But it was Joshua Alexander who began striding toward him.

  He had just entered the last month of his presidency and was looking very forward to that month ending. Word on the street was that the Secret Service worried he might climb the fence and make a run for it.

  It would be a shame to see him go. He was reasonably stable, capable of listening instead of talking, and had a genuine love of country. Most important, though, he was a man who understood when it was time to look the other way and let things get done.

  Unfortunately, his successor was cut from very different cloth. But that was a problem for another day.

  “Mitch,” he said, taking Rapp’s hand in a grip that wasn’t quite as forceful as normal. “Sorry to drag you away from home like this. You all right?”

  “It’s not a problem, sir. I’m fine.”

  He lowered his voice. “Don’t lie to me. I heard you lost a lot of blood.”

  “The bullet didn’t hit anything important and the docs topped me up. They tell me I’m good as new.”

  He grinned. “It’s been a long time since either one of us was as good as new. You know you’re not much use to me dead, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Alexander finally released his hand and turned back to the others in the room. “I think we can dispense with formalities and get to work. Mitch, take the chair on the right. It’s the most comfortable.”

  Rapp did and everyone settled in around him murmuring greetings and asking about his health.

  All were old friends, but the attention made him uncomfortable. He liked being at the White House even less than he liked being in Langley. His goal had always been to live as anonymous a life as possible and die of old age. Unfortunately, the former had already slipped through his fingers and the latter was about as likely as him being nominated for sainthood.

  “First,” Alexander said, “I want to thank Mitch on the behalf of the American people for what he did.”

  Rapp was a bit taken aback. “For screwing up?”

  “I don’t think most people would consider taking out four terrorists on US soil screwing up, Mitch.”

  “First of all, it was one at best. Bebe gets full credit for the diner. I’d probably be dead if it weren’t for her. And the other two committed suicide.”

  Alexander frowned and shook his head. “Can’t you just be satisfied for one minute? Take the win, Mitch.”

  “No, sir. This was a disaster. Setting aside the dead civilian, we somehow got made at that motel and we still don’t know how.”

  “These things can get messy,” General Templeton said. “We all know that. But the immediate threat’s been neutralized and that was the goal, right?”

  Rapp glanced at Kennedy, who leaned back with a slightly pained expression. “I haven’t had an opportunity to provide them with the latest intel, Mitch.”

  “What intel?” Alexander said.

  “We’re fairly certain that the men in that car weren’t Nahas and his technology expert. Because they seemed so intent on hiding their identity in both life and death, we looked further into the matter.”

  “But we know from their Internet activity that Nahas and his man were scheduled to be at that meeting,” the FBI director said.

  Kennedy nodded. “We believe the men who committed suicide were a bodyguard and a driver. Our search turned up a place by the side of the road where they’d pulled off. We have an exact tire tread match and we have the footprints of two individuals going into the woods. One of the boot prints is in Nahas’s size, which we know from his time working with US troops.”

  “Shit!” Alexander said. “Where are they now? Were we able to track them?”

  “No,” Rapp responded. “The mud by the side of the road made for good impressions but the surface is different in the trees. And the rain made dogs useless. Our best guess is that Nahas and his man went over the mountain and his people stayed behind to buy him time.”

  “Do you think they could have made it to safety? It’s getting down below freezing at night—”

  Rapp waved a hand, causing Alexander to fall silent. “Nahas is a son of a bitch, but he’s a tough, well-trained son of a bitch. Getting through those mountains—even with a tech geek in tow—wouldn’t be a big ask for him.”

  “And the person who calls himself PowerStation never made an appearance at all? He’s still out there?”

  “That’s correct,” Kennedy responded.

  Alexander leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. “Okay, what kind of threat are we talking about here? What can these people really accomplish?”

  “We don’t know exactly,” Kennedy said. “PowerStation is clearly knowledgeable about our grid but how deep that knowledge really goes is still a mystery.”

  “Is it possible he’s a foreign actor?”

  “Possible, but we’re betting against it. A foreign actor wouldn’t need ISIS as a partner.”

  “Okay,” Alexander said. “We’ve got someone—maybe even an American—who’s figured out a way to attack our grid and he’s looking for soldiers. That leads me to believe that he’s going to sabotage some of our infrastructure. Maybe he’s even come up with some kind of optimized plan—a way to do the maximum amount of damage with the minimum manpower. What’s our exposure to something like that?”

  “High,” Kennedy responded. “Someone could take out the entire US grid by destroying as few as nine critical substations. And that wouldn’t be difficult at all. The facilities I’m talking about are full of delicate, difficult-to-replace equipment and none have any security beyond chain link fences and a few security cameras. What would be difficult, though, is keeping the grid down. We have enough excess capacity to reroute around a pretty significant amount of damage.”

  “But based on his online statements, that’s exactly what he says he can do. Is it plausible that he’s telling the truth?”

  “Plausible? Yes. Likely? No. It’d take a combination of an extremel
y sophisticated cyberattack and numerous physical attacks around the country. The kind of access someone would need into hundreds—maybe even thousands—of utilities would be pretty extraordinary. For comparison, we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars penetrating Russia’s grid and while we could shut down a large portion of it, we couldn’t keep it down for very long without a massive coordinated effort from spec ops teams on the ground.”

  Alexander considered that for a moment. “But they’re out there, they’re clearly smart, and we know from experience that ISIS doesn’t lack commitment. What can we do to protect ourselves?”

  “There’s actually a bit of good news on that front,” Kennedy said. “The Department of Energy has been working on a report on our power grid’s vulnerabilities and ways we can mitigate those vulnerabilities. A draft was just released to Congress.”

  “I’m vaguely familiar with it,” Alexander said. “Enough that I know the recommendations are pretty elaborate. Even in an ideal environment, we’re talking about billions of dollars and years of effort, right? And let me just tell you that we don’t have an ideal environment. There are a lot of politicians and power companies that have reason to push back against the kinds of changes the DOE wants to make.”

  “Yes, sir. But with a potential imminent threat, I think we can use the report as a guide to create some emergency actions. Basically, things that’ll be relatively noncontroversial and easy to implement.”

  “Noncontroversial,” Alexander said. “You can’t paint a bathroom at the Agriculture Department without nearly triggering a civil war anymore. But let’s see what we can do. I want initial recommendations on my desk ASAP. But please… Keep them simple and cheap, Irene. I don’t have much weight to throw around anymore.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  Alexander turned toward TJ Burton, the head of FEMA. He’d been doing everything possible to make himself invisible and looked a little startled when everyone suddenly focused on him.

  “I think we should talk a little bit about what happens if something like this were to actually happen. There’s no question that we’ve left the door open for way too long and I’m curious about how we’d respond. TJ?”

  “I… I don’t think I understand the question.”

  “Worst-case scenario,” Rapp interjected. “Let’s say these sons of bitches take out the entire grid and it stays out for a year. What do we do?”

  Burton was unquestionably one of the most competent people in the US government. He’d lived and breathed disaster relief since the day he graduated from college and had gotten his hands dirty in more countries than anyone could count. He was the kind of guy who could coordinate the relief effort for an entire African nation while welding a structural support into a collapsing bridge.

  “I think it’d be safe to say that a successful attack on our grid keeps me awake more than any other threat.”

  “Why?” Alexander asked.

  “Because it comes from nowhere, it’s nationwide, and it could potentially be long-lasting. Those aren’t things I deal with. Think about storms. Those we can handle. You see them coming, you know roughly what they’re going to do, and they blow through pretty quickly. So, to answer your question, I have no idea what I’d do. I really don’t.”

  “Come on,” Rapp said. “You literally vacation in foreign disaster areas and you’re telling us you’ve got nothing? I don’t believe it.”

  “Okay. Maybe I’ve thought about it from time to time. But it’s just musing, you know? Something to pass the time when I’m mowing the lawn.”

  “And?” Alexander said.

  Burton let out a long breath, trying to put order to years of random ideas before speaking. “Look… Okay… America’s become super-efficient over the years. For instance, it used to be that virtually everyone in the country produced food. Now machines do most of the work. Only about two percent of our population is in the food production business. When those machines go down, what do you do? Beyond that, how do you move goods and people from one place to another with no fuel? And even if you had fuel, a lot of the roads would be blocked by people panicking and trying to get out of the cities. If it’s cold, people start to freeze. If it’s hot, they die of heatstroke. In a few days you’d start to lose backup power for communications, hospitals, and so on. The biggest and most immediate problem, though, would be water and sanitation. Most of the country’s pipes would run dry between a few days and a few weeks. Now people are dying of thirst and the lack of functioning toilets spreads disease at a time when medical personnel are either working in the dark or abandoning their posts. And then there’s the civil unrest. When people run out of basic necessities, they’re going to go looking for them. The grocery stores will be empty so they’ll go to warehouses. Then farms. And, eventually, other people’s homes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the power really went out for a year, you’d be looking at casualties in the three hundred million range.”

  “That’s the vast majority of the population,” Alexander said.

  “Right. Everyone’s going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it. FEMA would be completely paralyzed. My job is to move resources from unaffected areas to affected areas for a few days until everything is up and running again. That’s not the scenario we’re talking about here. The only way to win this game is not to play it.”

  People had described Burton as a genius and in Rapp’s experience, it was a fair assessment. But, like most geniuses, he was a little unstable. Rapp had gotten an up-close look at that instability in Sudan. Or was it Chad? In any event, his process always followed the same path. First, freak out. Second, calm down. Third, fix the problem.

  Time for a little tough love.

  “You think I like getting my ass shot off by terrorists?” Rapp said, letting a little anger edge into his voice. “But I went to work for the CIA, so that’s my problem. You went to work for FEMA, so this is your problem. Now quit whining and fix it.”

  Burton pulled back in his chair and then just sat there, wetting his lips with quick flicks of his tongue. “Okay. Right now—and I mean tomorrow—we need to start a public campaign encouraging people to start preparing. They need water, filters, radios… I can make a list. And these announcements have to be persuasive, but not so much so that we cause panic or even suspicion. That would lead to hoarding and everything would just get gridlocked.”

  “That’s quite a balancing act,” Alexander said. “Easier said than done.”

  “It gets worse,” Burton said. “If this were to really happen, it’s the end of democracy. All hands have to be on deck and you have to become a dictator. Anytime bickering breaks out in Washington, tens of thousands of Americans will die. Seriously, if some congressman withholds his support because he wants something in return, you need to have him shot.”

  “I imagine Mitch would be happy to take care of that,” Alexander said.

  There was some nervous laughter, but it didn’t do much to break the tension.

  “Then there’s the question of what we tell people,” Burton continued. “Do we just stay silent and let the rumor mill go crazy? Do we lie to people and tell them that the power will be back on soon in order to stave off panic? Do we tell the truth and watch the cities burn? Seriously, does anyone know? Because I don’t.”

  No one spoke up, so he continued. “Obviously, the military would have to be deployed. Not only for civil unrest but to protect food and fuel infrastructure.”

  “That’s not easy, either,” General Templeton said. “Even setting aside the legal issues, we rely on the same grid everyone else does.”

  “You might be able to stage out of Alaska and Hawaii,” Burton said. “They’re on different grids and probably wouldn’t be hit. Also, the navy has to be called back—nuclear craft in particular. They have reactors that could be used to power critical systems to the degree it’s possible.”

  “What about help from other countries?” Alexander said. “Europe has significant
capacity and China would probably pitch in as well because taking us off-line would bring their economy to its knees. And then there’s Mexico and Canada. They have less capacity but better proximity.”

  “You can probably forget the Canadians because a lot of their grid is connected to ours and would go down along with it. The Mexicans wouldn’t be much help because of our shaky relationship and their limited resources. Certainly, the Europeans and Chinese would be willing but there’s some question of whether they’d be able. Both countries import a lot of food from the U.S. When that flow stops, they’re going to need their domestic production to feed their own citizens. And even if they were able to send full cargo ships with all the supplies we need, how would we offload them without power?”

  “Or distribute it,” Rapp said.

  “Exactly. And then there’s the most unpredictable element. Personnel. They’re going to be affected by this the same as everyone else and eventually they’re going to walk away. You might have the best electrical engineer in the world, but when her family is in danger, she’s going to prioritize them over work. And without people, the whole thing goes into a death spiral. Nothing is getting fixed because our manpower is abandoning us and our manpower is abandoning us because nothing is getting fixed.”

  “I disagree,” Rapp said. “Manpower is actually one of the bright spots in this thing.”

  “Explain,” Alexander said.

  “In my experience, getting people to work in this kind of an environment isn’t all that hard. First, you identify your critical talent. And I don’t mean some congressman from Ohio with a third-rate law degree. With resources this limited, you have to prioritize pretty ruthlessly.”

  “And what’s step two?” Alexander asked.

  “You make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

  “Which is?”

  “That if they work twenty hours a day, seven days a week, their families get protection and food.”

  “And if they decided one day that they don’t want to be your indentured servant?” Burton said, obviously a bit horrified. “Would you just throw their spouses and kids out in the street?”