Zero Day: A Novel Read online

  The nose was now well down as the 787 plummeted toward the earth. The air slipping across the exterior controls of the airplane had restored flight control, but the yoke still denied it to the pilots.

  The sensation of falling was palpable. Behind the men now came a high-pitched howl neither could place. It was neither mechanical nor human. McIntyre glanced back, expecting the worst, and realized it was Westmore. He hadn’t thought it possible for a human voice to make such a sound. “Quiet, luv,” he said, trying to calm the terrified woman. “Please!” He turned to the front. “Disengaging auto!” In front of him, filling the entire windshield, was the blue expanse of ocean.

  “It’s rebooted now!” Jones shouted.

  Without warning, the plane suddenly responded to the yoke.

  “Oh, shit,” Jones said, as the captain began to try to raise the nose of the plane. The dials were giving information now. “Airspeed 915, altitude eight thousand! Easy, Bobby, easy. Don’t overdo it.” If they managed to pull the aircraft out of the dive, the danger was that it would rocket uncontrollably into the sky, a situation nearly as deadly as the dive itself.

  McIntyre pulled on the yoke steadily. His face was masked in sweat. His breath came out in short, labored puffs. The plane was pulling up in response to his command, but the horizon was still much too high, the space before them nothing but ocean.

  “Airspeed 1034, altitude four thousand! Oh, God!”

  McIntyre pulled back more forcibly on the yoke. They felt the g-forces as he compelled the airplane out of the dive.

  “Airspeed 1107, altitude three thousand!”

  “Come on, you bastard, come on.” McIntyre pulled the yoke well back, all but certain one of the wings was going to come off.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” Jones said. The g-forces pressed them heavily into their seats.

  “Get up, get up, motherfucker.” Behind the men, Westmore screamed again.

  “Airspeed 1122! Altitude twenty-three hundred!” Jones said in a high-pitched voice, almost in falsetto.

  “Climb, you bastard, climb!”

  Suddenly the g-forces vanished as if an invisible hand had been lifted from them.

  “We’re climbing!” Jones said with a laugh. “We’re climbing! Airspeed 1103, altitude twenty-six hundred!”

  Flight 188 rocketed into the sky like a ballistic missile.

  2

  MANHATTAN, NYC

  FISCHERMAN, PLATT & COHEN

  MONDAY, AUGUST 14

  9:07 A.M.

  “Coffee? A Danish?” she asked with an inviting smile.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine,” Jeff Aiken said, considering closing his eyes until summoned for the meeting.

  “Mr. Greene will with be with you any moment.”

  Jeff, still in a fog from his hasty trip, didn’t take the time to admire what he sensed was an inviting view. The receptionist was not yet thirty, stylishly dressed, trim, obviously fit, but wearing the latest hairstyle, which made her look as if she’d just crawled out of bed and sprayed it in place.

  Jeff had received the urgent call Saturday night—Sunday morning, actually—right after falling into a deep sleep, still dressed, splayed atop his bed at the Holiday Inn in Omaha, Nebraska. He’d just finished an exhausting all-night-all-day stint at National Interbank Charge Card Services. Their security system had been so porous that financial crackers, as criminally minded hackers were known, had systematically downloaded the personal accounts of more than 4 million “valued” customers. News accounts reported that the data looting had gone on for two weeks before being discovered. Jeff had tracked the information loss back more than three months and guessed it had been going on even longer.

  Once he’d agreed to fly to Manhattan and negotiated a substantial fee for his time, it had taken all day Sunday to finish the security checks he’d installed on the new NICCS system. He doubted it would save the company from the ire of its violated cardholders, or federal regulators. If the company had spent a thousandth of his fee on routine security earlier, none of this would have happened. He never ceased to be amazed at the mind-set of supposedly modern executives. They still conducted business as if this were the twentieth century.

  He’d arrived at the Omaha airport just in time to catch a red-eye to New York City. This would be his first trip there since the death of his fiancée, Cynthia, at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and he was almost overwhelmed by a range of unwelcome emotions. For an instant it was as if he were reliving the horror all over again. By the time he’d taken a taxi downtown, checked in and showered, he’d pushed his terrible memories aside and caught exactly ninety minutes sleep before shaving and dressing to arrive for this 9:00 a.m. meeting with Joshua Greene, managing partner of Fischerman, Platt & Cohen.

  “Mr. Aiken?”

  Jeff opened his eyes and realized he’d fallen asleep. He glanced at his watch: 9:23. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Greene and Ms. Tabor will see you now. Are you sure you don’t want some coffee?”

  “Thank you. You were right. I’ll take a coffee after all. Black.” He smiled sheepishly. “Better make it a large.”

  The receptionist laughed, flashing brilliant white teeth. She showed him through the double door into the managing partner’s office. “I’ll get that coffee right now,” she said.

  The reception area had been designed in a 1920s art deco style that Jeff believed was inspired by the original interior design, given the age of the building and the exterior motif. The impression was reinforced as he entered the conference room. Dressed in brown penny loafers and wrinkled tan chinos, a dark blue travel blazer with a matching light blue polo shirt, he was accustomed to looking out of place in most corporate offices. After all, he reasoned, they hired him for what he knew and could do, not for his wardrobe. With short sandy brown hair and dark eyes, he was six feet tall and thirty-six years of age and had mostly kept his athletic build despite his work. Even catalog clothing fit him well, a girlfriend had once commented.

  The pair sat at an expanse of glassy mahogany. The lawyer, Greene, was well dressed, to put it mildly, reminding Jeff of Gene Hackman in The Firm. That had been the mob’s law firm, and Hackman had been the bad guy. The other was their IT person; she was almost, but not quite, a fellow traveler with Jeff, though her clothes had a Gap and Banana Republic look.

  The well-suited man stood and introduced himself as Joshua Greene. “This is Sue Tabor, our IT manager. I thought it would save time if she sat in.”

  “We spoke late Saturday,” Sue said as she rose to shake hands.

  “Yes, I recall. Barely.”

  They waited as the receptionist returned with a large black coffee and a Danish Jeff had not requested. Greene waved her off before she could ask if anyone else wanted anything.

  Sue was slender, of partial Asian heritage, late twenties, with jet-black hair stylishly cut in a bob. Her slender lips were a crimson slash, and she wore more makeup than he was used to seeing in offices. Beneath her shirt he detected modest breasts, but her figure struck him as all angles. Her grip was firm, but there was no denying a certain shine in her eye as she met his gaze.

  Greene was perhaps sixty years old and had the look of a man who spent his share of time in the gym. Broad-shouldered, he had graying hair and wore glasses with scarcely any rim, the lenses reflecting as if made of crystal. If someone told that Jeff Greene had once played football, it would have come as no surprise. While Sue was clearly West Coast in her accent, Greene came from somewhere in the Midwest. Jeff had heard a lot of that Johnny Carson talk in Omaha.

  “I don’t want to waste your time, Aiken,” the lawyer said, “but I’d like to give you a brief summary before I hand you over to Sue. Saturday morning one of our associates came in earlier than usual and found himself the first in the office. When he attempted to use his computer, he could not. He checked with other computers and discovered that none of them were working. Sue was summoned and … I’ll let her handle that part.”

  Greene cl
eared his throat. “I just want you to understand how critical this is. We billed more than ninety million dollars last year. We’re not a large firm, obviously, but we are highly respected in our field. According to Sue, we cannot access our computer system. This includes our litigation records, both current as well as archived, e-mail, and our billing records. She also suspects that everything may be lost, or lost in part. She tells me that until we identify the source of the problem, we cannot even access our backup records to determine if they’ve been contaminated.”

  Greene gave Jeff a withering look that suggested he was at fault for the situation. “In short, we are dead in the water. Our cash flow has been stopped; our attorneys are unable to adequately work on existing cases. Once clients start figuring this out, those in a position to will defect, the others will sue. We need everything back, as soon as possible. The situation is critical.”

  Sue spoke, eyeing Jeff steadily. “The server is unbootable. I couldn’t access the system at all.”

  That was odd, Jeff thought. In most cases, an infected computer would still boot, even if it didn’t properly operate thereafter. “What are you able to do as an office?” Jeff asked.

  “The attorneys are working on e-mail through our Internet provider’s backup system,” she said. “Many had current files in their laptops and are using those. I’ve not touched our backups since I have no idea what I’m dealing with here.”

  “How do you handle those?” Jeff asked.

  “We have nightly backups of each computer to an in-house master server. Once a week, we make backup tapes that are stored in a fireproof safe. Once a month, we make a second set of backup tapes, and those are stored in another safe, off-site.”

  “Good. We’ll have something to work with. How much can you tell me about what happened?”

  “Sorry to say, almost nothing. The system simply isn’t accessible. Not to me, at least.” Sue grimaced.

  Greene spoke. “Working without computers is a real problem for us. The younger attorneys simply don’t know how to do without them; they’ve always had access to the various legal databases and resources. I had no idea we’d become so dependent on them.” He glanced at Sue, then back to Jeff. “And obviously, being denied access to our work product is a serious problem—one that will prove very costly if you fail to fix this in a timely manner. Serious enough to put us out of business, in fact.

  “But my most immediate concern is the prospect of losing our recent billing records. The longer we are down, the worse this is going to get. The system was automated. Now our attorneys are using pen and paper. We need to have our automated program up and running, and we need those billing records. They are vital. As is the case with any company, our income stream is essential.”

  Jeff took a long pull of coffee. It was hot and bitter. “Have you considered that your staff may have the virus in their laptops, since they were connecting to their office computers?”

  Sue nodded. “I thought of that. Over the weekend I warned them not to boot, but I was too late. Some had already turned on their computers, but they had no problems. I’ve been running virus scans and system checks on their computers and found nothing other than the usual. Fortunately, so far whatever struck us is limited to our main system. Or seems to be.” She smiled wanly.

  “Do you have any idea what it is?” Jeff asked.

  “None, but that’s not really my area. Our firewall is excellent and up-to-date. We run antivirus software and keep it current. When I say ‘up-to-date,’ I mean daily. I have an assistant whose first job every morning is updating everything, seeing to the patches and running system security scans. He does that before he does anything else, and he comes to work ahead of most of the associates. So you can appreciate that I’m mystified how this could happen, because it should not have.”

  “That sounds good. And you’re right: your measures should have been enough.” Faced with the fresh challenge, Jeff felt himself growing suddenly alert and energized. This was very different from the work he’d just been doing, and any solution was going to be demanding, exactly the kind of problem in which he could lose himself.

  Greene interrupted Jeff’s thoughts. “I’ve got a meeting with the other partners and need to give them something. How long, Aiken? How long will this take, and how much of our information can we get back?”

  “I can’t say, in all honesty. Not at this point. I’ll let you know as soon as I can make an assessment.”

  “All right,” Greene said grimly. “I’m told you’re the best. I need you to prove it.”

  3

  DETROIT, MICHIGAN

  MONDAY, AUGUST 14

  9:21 A.M.

  Buddy Morgan, balding, fifty-three years old, overweight, returned from his coffee break four minutes early. A twenty-three-year veteran of the United Auto Workers, he had the right to select his own shift; that’s why he was working now. The supervisor, a longtime drinking companion, didn’t give him any grief while the new robots did what they were programmed to do.

  Not like the old days, not at all. Buddy had served his time on an air gun, the last eight years of it driving three nuts home to partially mount the right front wheel of the Ford Taurus. God, how he’d hated those never-ending days.

  But that was behind him. Now he had seniority. As he told his wife, June, he was nothing more than a grease monkey. The robots did all the work. His job was to make sure they stayed online.

  It was a helluva system, he had to admit. His domain was fourteen of the robots, “turkeys” as he called them. Each consisted of a massive arm mounted on a squat pedestal. At the working end of the arm was the “head,” complete with a “beak.” This was the part that did the welding, fast, accurate, untiring. The whole “gaggle”—he was unaware that the proper word was rafter—was run by the master computer. He monitored a dummy terminal at his workstation, but had no control of the system. That was work for the college boys.

  Buddy spent most of his shift at his station, glancing at the monitor, then up at the slow-moving assembly line, then at his turkeys, nodding and twisting in their odd dance. The area around the workstation was filled with the smell of electronic welding and a not unpleasant sweet aroma of fine oil that came from the robots. His nearest coworker was a hundred feet away, and that was just fine with Buddy. Most UAW brothers were a pain in the ass.

  Buddy’s job was simple enough. He walked behind the turkeys and checked the moving parts for signs of a problem. This rarely happened. Japanese-designed, the things were built in Korea and could really take it, he often said. On a regular schedule, he pulled one off-line for examination. Not pulled, exactly; he pressed a large blue plastic button that caused the robot to retreat from the assembly line five feet. There he lubricated certain points, in all just six; then he wiped the entire machine down, though that really wasn’t his job, but he liked his turkeys looking good; then he pressed the blue button again, and the docile thing slid back in place.

  The amazing part was that the other turkeys knew one of them was missing—something to do with the programming—and they simply assumed the job of the one he took off-line. Amazing. Really amazing. If you didn’t get laid off, this automation thing was a wonder.

  At first he’d been surprised such high-tech turkeys required manual oiling at all. He’d figured they’d designed that into them. His trainers explained that they had originally been self-oiling, but factory managers, in an excess of cost-mindedness, had put the robots on the floor without adequate supervision. There had been some real problems. They might be twenty-first-century marvels, but a certain number of turkeys required the presence of a human. The solution had been to design them so they had to be serviced regularly.

  But for the most part, his fourteen turkeys worked untended and to perfection. They were completely silent, as far as he could tell. The only sound came when they zapped the frame of the SUV moving along its two rails, like a subway car crawling along.

  Today, however, Number Eight was giving him f
its. He’d pulled it off-line three times already, and his boss, Eddie, told him to quit messing with it. Take it off-line for good and let the techs fix it. The other turkeys could take up the slack for a few hours.

  That struck Buddy as pretty sloppy. He would never have told anyone, not even June, but he loved sitting at his station, that monitor frozen in place telling him everything was as it should be, the turkeys, nodding and straightening, twisting this way and that, as they welded the frame of Ford’s new SUV, the first of the really big hybrids. He just loved it.

  But Eddie had a point. Sometimes even a turkey acted up. They could work forever, but not without some maintenance. Buddy reached Number Eight and lowered his hand to press the button. Unseen behind him, the dummy monitor at his workstation flickered. The screen reset.

  Along the line, the turkeys stopped in place. Then, like soldiers in close-order drill, they pulled themselves back as if standing to attention. Buddy stopped what he was doing and gawked. He’d never seen anything like this. The assembly line was still moving, but the turkeys weren’t zapping the frames. He stepped forward to take a better look.

  At that moment, all fourteen turkeys spun in place in a violent, dizzying circle. Number Eight struck Buddy with its beak, sending him flying onto the assembly line, landing with a loud grunt, sprawling across the tracks.

  Stunned, he couldn’t move for several vital seconds. Just as he grasped where he was, the frame of a new Monument SUV moved across his neck.

  4

  MANHATTAN, NYC

  IT CENTER

  FISCHERMAN, PLATT & COHEN

  MONDAY, AUGUST 14

  9:32 A.M.

  After Greene left the conference room, Sue Tabor led Jeff to the IT room, moving with a catlike grace. “Don’t let his manner bother you,” she said. “Josh is a good guy—for a lawyer, I mean—but his neck’s on the line over this. If we don’t recover enough data to save his hide, he’ll be forced into retirement and I may be out of a job.”