The whole case had changed in an instant.

What was COE all about now? Certainly it was now about much more than simply wanting Middle Eastern oil to stop being imported.

He parked the Crown Vic in the nearly empty underground garage at Federal Plaza, knowing the moment word was out on the shootings, the place would come alive.

Gray, as usual, looked the mad-genius part—slightly disheveled, clothes wrinkled, hair sticking up, black circles under his eyes. He was a comforting sight and had rapidly become one of Nicholas’s most trusted allies. They understood each other.

Gray threw his hands up when he saw Nicholas, didn’t mention the condition he was in—black face, burned hands, no sleeves on his shirt, ripped and bloody pants. No time, no time. “This is bad, Nicholas. Someone sent a Trojan horse into the oil companies’ e-mail systems. A simple e-mail, designed to look internal, sent to every e-mail address on the corporate rolls, supposedly from the heads of the company themselves. And inside was a nasty worm.

“One of the staff members at ConocoPhillips opened the e-mail from home, thinking it was a note from his boss. It took control of the server from there, unspooled into the system, started wiping hard drives, and no one has been able to get back in. Their Web folks are freaking out. They called us in a panic. I’ve been working on it since. So far, I can’t crack it. It’s working like a distributed denial-of-service attack, but the attackers have put in their own firewalls. So not only can I not get in, I can’t track what they’re doing while they’re inside. All it took was one click. One damn click. The odds were in their favor.”

Nicholas’s brain sparked. “Are we dealing with a DDoS, stopping outsiders from accessing the company websites, or are they taking remote control of the facilities?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get in far enough to tell what they’re up to.”

“If their goal was to blow our infrastructure, this was a good way to go about it. Is it COE who launched the attack? Have they claimed responsibility?”

“They didn’t have to; their COE logo is front and center on the screen.” Gray clicked his mouse a few times and the screen in front of him turned white. In the middle floated a stylish monogram with elegant, ornate letters—

Nicholas said, “We have to get in. The worm could be downloading information as well as wiping the memory off the servers. If so, they’ll have access to everything from internal e-mails to finances.”

“Not to mention they can turn the power off to any of the physical locations at will. So much is run by computers today—they could tell the pumps to stop working, and boom. You don’t need a bomb to stop oil production in its tracks.” He hit two more keys. “Look at this.”

The white screen disappeared, and the Shanghai SE Composite Index came up. Numbers ran furiously along the bottom of the screen, red, red, red.

“You can see word is out that something’s up—the overseas markets are already dumping oil stocks. If they continue the pace of this sell-off, we’re going to be in trouble when the markets open over here. Nicholas, if you can’t get in and stop it, I think we should tell Zachery he needs to try getting trading suspended and not opening the stock market this morning.”

“Let me see if I can get past the firewall and limit the damage. Regardless, we need to ask Zachery to talk to the suits on Wall Street, do some spinning. The media will be wild about this, and on top of the explosion—”

“It’s too late for damage control, Nicholas, since the financial markets are already reacting. We have to break COE’s encryption and get the oil companies back online, pronto, or we’re all going to have a very bad morning.”

Nicholas sent a prayer heavenward. “Send all of this to me, Gray. I’ll see what I can do. Oh, yes, you say some prayers, too.”

16

KNIGHT ON B TO D7

Nicholas booted up his computer, made sure he was on the secure internal red server. If he was going to stop this attack, he had to enter the world that was alive and well and lived behind the Web. He initiated his TOR software, left the real-world Internet behind, and headed into the darknet.

He plugged in Gray’s files, started probing the firewalls COE had set up.

Gray was right. The coding was good. More than good, it was solid. Seemingly unbreakable.

“No, this won’t do at all,” he said, and started typing, launching his own protocols to attack the worm.

Three minutes later, two layers of encryption were down. Now he was staring at a deep network of code. Whoever had written it was incredibly sophisticated, which helped narrow the suspects. He kept digging and noticed a repeated line of code. He felt a niggling sense of familiarity—it was the structure of the language. Flashy, that was it, “aren’t I clever; you’ll never catch me” flashy. After examining the threads for a few moments, he saw what he needed, and he smiled. This code wasn’t homegrown in the United States. This had been bought from an outsider.

A few more clicks and he knew he was right. The hacker who’d written the code was more than sophisticated, he was on the highest level. And then it came to him—he knew. It was the electronic signature of a German he knew. Gunther Ansell sold hijacked server proxies to the highest bidder—making millions of dollars per proxy. Gunther had always been an egotist, and Nicholas had always known if Gunther kept showing off with his code, putting in his signature, it would be his downfall one day.

Sorry, Gunther, today isn’t going to be your day. He buzzed Gray. “I’ve got a line in.”

Gray came to his cube, laptop in hand. “How did you do it?”

“I’ll show you once we’ve stopped their attack. Call the IT guys who are working for these companies, tell them to ready their new code now. I’m going to need you for a side attack. Upload our denial-of-service package, and I’m going to throw a little homegrown code into the mix. We have to move fast to break their stranglehold. By now they know the breach has been noticed and they’ll be working to close the loop.”

Gray pulled up a squeaky chair, set the laptop on it, and knelt on the floor, brought up a screen full of code. “Ready when you are.”

“Three, two, one . . . go.”

Gray launched his attack, and Nicholas did as well, using his own code to snap along Gunther’s, attacking, dissolving thread after thread. Gunther was good, very good, but so was Nicholas. Five minutes later the first firewall came down, and Nicholas had control of the ConocoPhillips server.

Nicholas pumped a fist in the air. “Yes! Now we’re on to Occidental’s mainframe.”

Twenty minutes later, they’d wrested back control of all the servers and handed them off to the IT heads of each company.

Nicholas let out a big breath. The damage done by the cyber-attack would take weeks to undo, but at least they’d stopped it cold. The companies wouldn’t know the depth of their issues until they had a chance to do a full security assessment. There was no doubt in his or Gray’s mind the attacks would continue, and soon. But for now, they’d won.

“Gray, pray it will hold. COE’s hackers will try to attack again, I’m sure.”

“Still, it’s a big save. Good going, Nicholas. Zachery will be very pleased, as will the CEOs of the companies we bailed out.”

Nicholas looked at the clock. “It’s late morning in Germany. This genius—Gunther Ansell is his name—he isn’t known to frequent daylight. Chances are right now he’s at home, asleep.” Nicholas grabbed his cell. “If we move fast enough, we can get people in to snatch him before he wakes. We’ll have them take him to a dark site, have a chat with him, get a line into who hired him to build the code and how they paid, and boom—we just might have our problem solved.”