CyberStorm Part 5

"Really?" Her face lit up. "I'll slide you right in."

My face flushed at the imagined innuendo. "That'd be great."

Silence while we waited for the elevator to drop to the ground floor.

"You're going to need more than that."

"Huh?"

She was looking at my thin jacket.

"It's freezing out. Did you see the storm warnings? The coldest Christmas since 1930. So much for global warming," she laughed.

"They should have called it global warning," I laughed back.

She turned to me.

"You're an internet guy, right?"

I shrugged yes.

"Did you notice that it was almost impossible to get on the web this morning?"

That got my attention.

"I did. Are you on Roadrunner too?" It must be some type of carrier problem in the building.

"No," she replied. "On CNN they're saying it's a virus or something."

The elevator stopped at the ground floor and opened.

"A virus?"

11:55 a.m.

GIVING BLOOD TOOK longer than I'd imagined. Pam moved me first in line, but it was a quarter past ten by the time I finally exited the Red Cross, donut in hand, to catch a cab into Midtown.

I figured I would do a round of our four clients in the center of town, drop off the gifts-shaking hands if anyone was around-and then run back to do some grocery shopping. I'd swing by home, drop off the food and check on Luke while I grabbed a bite to eat with Irena, and then head down to the Financial District for the final two client gift drop-offs and maybe a holiday drink or two.

Buoyed by the feel-good sensation of giving blood, or perhaps high from a lack of oxygen and red blood cells, my trip into Midtown took on a cinematic aura. I gawked out of the window of my cab, watching the holiday shoppers bustling by on the streets, caught up in the excitement of New York at Christmas. Everyone was bundled up in hats and scarves against the intense and sudden cold, shopping bags in hand.

The first stop was next to Rockefeller Center, and after dropping the gift off, I spent at least ten minutes standing and looking at the tree outside. The energy and vitality was amazing, and I even offered to take pictures for a few tourists.

My route then took me up past the Plaza Hotel, along Central Park, and looping back toward downtown. I was texting with Lauren about what we needed for food, but for the last half hour she'd stopped answering my texts.

After I finished my rounds in Midtown, I hopped in a taxi and had it drop me back in Chelsea at Whole Foods. After cruising up and down the aisles for half an hour, filling my shopping cart and getting into the Christmas spirit, I finally arrived at the check-out line.

It was huge.

I waited ten minutes, checking my e-mail a few times, before asking a frustrated-looking woman in front of me, "What's going on?"

"I don't know," she replied over her shoulder. "Seems like they're having some problems with the computers."

"Mind watching my stuff while I go and have a look?"

I left my cart and wandered off toward the cash registers. The crowd of people intensified as I moved forward, ending in a knot of angry shoppers.

"Why can't you just take cash?" one of them said.

"Sir, we can't let you take anything out of the store unless it's scanned," replied a frightened-looking cashier, a young girl who was helplessly waving around a bar scanner.

I slipped in behind the registers to address the cashier directly.

"What's happening?" I asked.

Turning to me she said, "It's still not working, sir."

She was fl.u.s.tered and must have thought I was a manager.

"Explain to me again exactly what happened, from the start."

"The scanning devices just stopped working. We've been waiting for technical support for an hour, but nothing," she replied. In a hushed voice she added, "My cousin on the Upper East Side texted me and said that their store was out as well."

The angry customer, a large Hispanic man, grabbed my arm. "I just want to get out of here, bro. Can't you take cash?"

I held up my hands. "Not my call to make."

He looked straight at me. I expected to see anger, but he looked scared.

"Screw this. I've been waiting an hour." He threw a few twenties onto the counter in front us. "Just keep the change, man."

Grabbing his bags of food, he began pushing his way through the crowd. People around him were watching, and a few of them began to wind forwards to leave money at the counter. Several more just started leaving out the door, taking whatever they were holding without paying.

"What's going on?" I muttered aloud. It wasn't like New Yorkers to start stealing.

"It's the news, sir, the Chinese," replied the cashier.

"What news?"

"That aircraft carrier thing," was all she could add, but by that point I was already pushing my way toward the door, suddenly and irrationally fearful for Luke.

2:45 p.m.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU tell me before?"

I was pacing back and forth in front of the huge flat-panel TV that dominated one wall of Chuck's apartment.

"I figured you'd just think it was me being paranoid," replied Chuck. Blurry images of a smoking aircraft carrier filled the screen behind me.

I'd returned to the Borodins' in a rush and knocked loudly on their door. While walking the few blocks up from Whole Foods I'd searched the news on my smartphone. It'd taken forever to respond.

There'd been an incident in the South China Sea. A Chinese warplane had crashed. The Chinese were claiming it was an attack by the Americans, but the American forces were denying anything to do with it, saying it was an accident. The governor of Shanxi Province, in northern China, was all over the news claiming it was an act of war.

Luke was fine when I arrived, but his fever had gotten worse. He was sweating profusely, and Irena explained to me that he'd been crying most of time I'd been gone. I'd left him at the Borodins', letting him rest, and gone over to Chuck's.

"You didn't think that this was maybe something important to share?" I asked incredulously.

"Not at the time I didn't."

CNN was on again in the background. "Sources in the Pentagon deny any responsibility for the crashed Chinese warplane, saying that it was the result of the inexperience of Chinese forces in operating at-sea carrier operations-"

"You haven't had any food deliveries to your restaurants in a week and you didn't think I might be interested?"

"-Poison Trojan has now infected DNS servers worldwide. The Chinese are denying responsibility, but the bigger issue now is the Scramble virus that has infected logistics systems-"

"I didn't think it was relevant," replied Chuck. "We have computer problems all the time."

The virus that had shut down FedEx and UPS had shifted gears to infect almost every other commercial shipping software, grinding the world's supply chain to a halt.

"I've been reading the hacker message boards," added Chuck helpfully. "They're saying that UPS and FedEx are proprietary systems, and that the speed of the virus means it must have hundreds of unique 'zero-days' in it."

"What's a 'zero-day'?" asked Susie.

She was sitting on the couch next to Chuck, holding tightly onto Ellarose, whose head bobbled up and down as she watched me pacing in circles like a caged tiger. Susie was a real Southern Belle, a brunette with long, silky hair, sun-kissed freckles, and a slim figure, but her pretty brown eyes were now filled with concern.

"It's a new virus, right?" Chuck ventured, looking toward me.

I wasn't a security expert, but I was an electrical engineer and computer networks were my field of expertise. Just the day before I'd been having a conversation with a colleague in the security field about this topic.

"Sort of," I explained. "A 'zero-day' is a software vulnerability that isn't yet doc.u.mented. A 'zero-day' attack is one that uses one of these previously unknown weaknesses in a system. It's an attack that has had zero days to be a.n.a.lyzed yet."

Any system had weaknesses. The ones that were "known" usually had patches or fixes, and the list of new "known" vulnerabilities expanded at the rate of hundreds per week for the thousands of commercial software vendors in the world.

With a typical Fortune 500 company using thousands of individual software programs, the list of vulnerabilities often hovered in the tens of thousands at any given moment. It was an impossible game of catch-up against an adversary that only needed one hole to remain open among literally millions that an organization had to continually fix.

While everyone, private or government, struggled to keep up even with the list of known vulnerabilities, against "unknown" vulnerabilities, or "zero-days," the situation was even worse. They had nearly no defense, precisely because the attack vectors were, by definition, unknown.

They both stared at me blankly.

"It means an attack that we have no defense against."

Stuxnet, the virus that had taken down the Iranian nuclear processing plants, had used about ten zero-days to get inside the systems it attacked. It was one of the first public examples of a new breed of sophisticated cyberweapons. They cost a lot of time and money to build, so someone wouldn't be unleashing these ones without some purpose in mind.

"What do you mean, attacks that we have no defense against?" asked Susie. "How many of these are there? Can't the government stop it?"

"The government mostly looks to the private sector to protect this stuff," I replied. "And n.o.body has any idea of all the ways we could be attacked."

CNN had switched to a discussion between four commentators and a.n.a.lysts. "The thing that has me worried, Roger, is that computer viruses, especially sophisticated ones like this, are usually designed to infiltrate networks to get information out. These don't seem to be doing that. They're just bringing the computer systems down."

"What does that mean?" asked Susie, staring at the TV screen.

As if answering her question, the a.n.a.lyst looked straight into the camera and said slowly, "The only thing I can a.s.sume is that we're being purposely attacked, with the only goal of inflicting as much damage as possible."

Susie brought one hand up to cover her mouth. Saying nothing, I sat down next to them and tried calling Lauren again for the dozenth time.

Where is she?

5:30 p.m.

"I'M SORRY."

Lauren was holding tightly onto Luke. When we'd retrieved him from the Borodins', he was crying in great wailing sobs. I'd tried feeding him, but he didn't want anything. His forehead was burning up.

"Sorry doesn't quite cut it," I complained. "Come on, give Luke back to me. I'll try feeding him again."

"I'm sorry, baby," said Lauren quietly, speaking to Luke and not me. She held onto him fiercely, shaking her head and not giving him up. Her face was flushed bright red from the cold outside, her hair a tangled mess.

"Why the h.e.l.l didn't you answer my texts for four hours?"

We were back in our own apartment. Lauren was sitting on our leather loveseat across from me on our couch. It was dark outside. I'd spent the whole afternoon trying to get in touch with Lauren, but she'd been totally unreachable. At half past five she'd suddenly shown up at Chuck's door, asking questions about what was going on, asking where Luke was.

"I had my cell off. I forgot."

I avoided asking what she'd been doing.

"And you didn't notice all this was going on?"

"No, Mike, I didn't. The whole world isn't attached to CNN. When I found out I rushed straight home, but there were no taxis and the Two and Three lines weren't working, so I had to walk twenty blocks in the freezing cold," she said defensively. "Have you ever tried running in high heels?"

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Everyone's nerves were on edge, and it wasn't any use fighting. Sighing, I relaxed.

"Why don't you try feeding him?" I said, my voice softening. "Maybe if mommy tries feeding him he'll eat?"

Luke had stopped crying and was sniffling, his face covered in snot. Picking up a wet wipe from a plastic container on our coffee table, I got up and reached over to try and clean his face. He fussed and moved his head back and forth, leaning back out of my reach.

"He really is burning up," said Lauren, peering into his face and putting a hand to his forehead.

"Just a little winter cold," I said rea.s.suringly. He looked unhappy, but not that bad.

My cell phone pinged a text message. Lauren's phone chirped as well, and through the open doorway to our apartment I could hear Chuck's and Susie's phones too. Frowning, I pulled my phone from my pocket and swiped the code to open it, clicking open the new text message.

"Health Advisory Warning Widespread infection bird flu H5N1 New York Connecticut. Highly pathogenic. Advise public stay indoors, emergency closure Fairfield County Manhattan Financial District outlying areas."

It was from the NY-ALERT emergency notification service that Chuck had joined us up to.

"What is it?"

Reading and rereading the message, I looked up in horror, watching Lauren wiping more snot away from Luke's face with her bare hand, wetly kissing his bare cheek. I remembered taking Luke out to meet all my clients in the days before. My mind filled with images of him getting kisses from people in Chinatown, Little Italy, all over the place. And then there was that Chinese family down the hall whose parents had just arrived from the mainland. Did I expose him to something?