The Turing Test Page 4

  Barker flipped forward a few pages and studied what he found. “Not bad. Have you thought about working up a predictive model? That could be useful, if you’re on to something.”

  “Yes. Besides wanting to let you know what we’re thinking, we wanted to see if you could assign us some additional staff to do exactly that.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “We were thinking of doing a pilot test using a list of what we assume would be the most likely targets in the U.S. and China if our theory is correct. In the first step, we’d estimate what volume of greenhouse gases each potential target releases each year.

  “The second step would involve tracking new attacks. Let’s say the next announcement here or in China would have an annual negative impact equal to a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide. We would enter that amount in the program, and it would display all the combinations of power plants and other infrastructure that could be hit to offset approximately that amount. Even if we don’t pick the right targets every time, the attacks will still support the theory if the output and the impact numbers match up for whatever targets did get hit.”

  Barker flipped through the rest of the report. “Sounds plausible. What do you figure you’ll need to run the pilot?”

  “Let’s say fifty percent of a programmer’s time for a week to write the software and one person full-time to pull together and manage the data for as long as the pilot lasts.”

  “Anybody specific you have in mind for the full-time person?”

  “I was thinking you could assign the full-time job to me,” Shannon interrupted. “I’m already involved on the incident side, and it would be more efficient for me to pick this up than orient someone new to the project. It wouldn’t be hard to off-load my other work.”

  Frank looked at Shannon with surprise; she smiled back.

  “Okay,” Barker said. “Makes sense. Go ahead and get started as quick as you can. The NSA director is getting a lot of heat from the White House to come up with some answers, and so far, we’ve got nothing.”

  * * *

  “Congratulations on signing up Barker for the pilot,” Shannon said on their way back to Washington. After one look at Frank’s car, she had volunteered to give him a lift whenever there was a meeting at Fort Meade.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I wasn’t sure he’d bite. Staff’s always tight, so he’ll have to pull someone off something else. Oh – and thanks for volunteering.”

  She turned and smiled. “Of course. Say, do you want to grab dinner somewhere? I’d love to hear more about where you want to take the pilot program.”

  “Tonight? I don’t think I can tonight. But I can fill you in for sure first thing in the morning.”

  “Okay,” she said. Their conversation lagged a bit after that. When she dropped him off, he watched with a touch of regret as she drove away. He didn’t have any plans. He’d just turned her down by reflex. Why? He trudged up the stairs and stared at the bland, blank slate of his door for a moment before stepping inside to heat up yet another solitary dinner of pre-prepared food.

  The next morning, he found himself staring again, this time at his laptop while waiting for Shannon to pick him up. Eventually he went ahead and typed “Shannon Doyle” into the browser.

  Hmm. Berkeley undergraduate, summa cum laude, and a master’s degree from Stanford. That was impressive. He clicked on the images tab and found pictures of her with her family and a few with what must be college friends, hiking and skiing and traveling abroad. She always looked like she was having a great time, and so did the people around her.

  Feeling a bit guilty, he looked out the window; there was her car. He closed his laptop and trotted downstairs.

  * * *

  Marla was talking on the phone the following evening when Frank met her outside a restaurant. “Do you really have to? Okay. Yes, I understand. Love you, too.” Marla dropped her phone in her bag.

  “Tim stuck at the office?”

  “Yes. They caught him right as he was walking out the door. I guess it’s just you and me for dinner.”

  “Is that so terrible?”

  “Of course not. We’ll have more time to catch up.”

  They settled in at their table and ordered drinks. “So,” Marla said, “what’s new?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “It’s payback for all the times I asked you what was new at school,” Frank said.

  “Very funny,” she said. “And half the time when you say nothing, it isn’t true. How’s your big secret project for the government going?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Can you be a little more informative than that?”

  “Well, like you said, it’s a secret project.”

  She groaned. “Noted. So, let me try a different tack. Are the folks you’re working with interesting?”

  “Well, there’s just one, really.”

  “And is he?”

  “She.”

  Marla’s eyes brightened. “Ah! Young? Old?”

  Frank leaned back and frowned. “Kind of in between.”

  “Pretty?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “Directed at anyone else, a pretty easy one. But have it your way. Is she drop-dead gorgeous?”

  “No.”

  “Well, is she reasonably attractive?”

  “Oh, come on. Do you always have to do this?”

  “Yes. Answer the question.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what?” she said, pressing her attack.

  “All right, so you’d probably think she was pretty good looking.”

  “Great. Now we’re getting somewhere! Are you enjoying working with her?”

  “She’s very smart.”

  “That’s good, but it’s not what I asked.”

  Their drinks arrived, offering enough of a diversion for Frank to escape to the men’s room. Maybe he could change the topic on his return.

  On his way back, he stopped in his tracks, amazed. He retreated backward against the wall to avoid being noticed. There could be no question who the young, earnest woman was, leaning across the table and speaking so emphatically. Or who the brow-furrowed, cornered-looking young man nodding defensively was either. Frank returned to his table.

  “You’ll never guess in a million years who I just saw having dinner together.”

  “Carl and Josette? Yes, I noticed them earlier.”

  “But,” Frank stammered, “doesn’t that strike you as an incredibly bizarre coincidence? The pole-up-his-butt FBI agent assigned to protect you during the missile crisis and the French graduate student who played me for all I was worth during the election hacking?”

  “Not really,” she said, unfolding her napkin. “It’s possible I introduced them.”

  “Carl and Josette? Really? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why? I thought they were made for each other. Don’t you agree?”

  Frank leaned back in his chair, still grappling with the surprise. Then he shook his head. “I guess, yes, now that you mention it.” Then a broad grin split his face. “In fact, I totally agree.”

  It wasn’t until he was walking Marla back to the Metro station that she started grilling him again about Shannon.

  “You sounded awfully defensive about the person you’re working with. Is there something going on there?”

  “No, there isn’t!”

  “So why the sensitivity?”

  “Who says there’s sensitivity?” Frank said.

  “How long have we known each other?”

  “Okay, okay. So, I think she might be interested in me.”

  “Aha! What’s so terrible a
bout that? You said she’s attractive and smart. And apparently – who knows why – she’s open-minded enough to take an interest in a curmudgeonly older geek who’s as outgoing as a houseplant. Somebody like that doesn’t come along often, you know.”

  He knew that very well indeed.

  They were at the Metro Station now. He gave her a hug. “Give Tim my best, okay?”

  “Will do. But why don’t you consider asking out – what’s her name?”

  “Who?”

  She poked him in the stomach, extracting the kind of satisfying “Oof!” she had hoped for.

  “You know exactly who I mean. What’s her name?”

  “It’s Shannon.”

  “Why don’t you ask Shannon out?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Will you really? Or are you just trying to escape my questions?”

  “The latter.”

  She laughed and gave him another hug. “You’re impossible. Get home safely.”

  “You too.” He watched Marla disappear down the escalator and then started walking home. Well, why didn’t he ask Shannon out? He was pretty sure she wanted him to. And his apartment seemed even more cold and empty than usual. What did he have to lose?

  He made a half-hearted effort to convince himself it would be foolish to risk complicating a working relationship with a social one. But it didn’t work. Clearly, he had more to gain than to lose. The real reason for his inaction was he instinctively shied away from human contact and the chance of rejection. Well, that was who he was. Might as well own it and leave well enough alone.

  5

  Working in a Coal Mine

  George Green let go of the dead-man switch on his pneumatic drill. Once its clattering roar died away, he realized why Larry had grabbed his shoulder. Even with his ear protectors on, he could hear the angry boom of the emergency evacuation alarm echoing through the tunnel. He lowered the heavy drill to the ground and fell in behind his shift buddies as they started double-timing it along the coal face.

  Almost immediately, the regular lighting blinked out, leaving only intermittent emergency lights to show the way. Then those began to flicker. What if they died, too? They’d be fumbling their way to safety in absolute darkness. They speeded up, trotting with difficulty in their heavy boots.

  Green was winded and ready to slow down long before he reached the gallery leading to the elevator. The narrow passageway was jammed with shuffling miners. As he merged into the crowd, the emergency lights in the tunnel he’d just left died; thank God, the lights were still on ahead.

  He noticed the emergency lights die in the next tunnel, too, as the last miners joined the crowd. What the hell was happening? Emergency lights were battery powered. They were designed to last for days, not minutes. The ventilators were off, too; everything seemed to be breaking down except that damned emergency alarm. It was pursuing them like some invisible, baying beast, ready to devour them if they slowed down for even a moment. Sweating heavily, he prayed he’d make it out before everything went dark.

  By the time he finally saw the elevator up ahead, the throng was barely moving. The crowd of miners was big and restless. Discipline was holding, but the tension was dark and black as the coal that imprisoned them. Everyone was jammed in tight, and the air was foul and stifling; humid and thick with the stench of hot grease, coal dust and anxious humanity. But it was eerily quiet. Almost silent, except for the faint, metallic hum of the elevator cables running up to safety.

  It seemed to take longer each time for the elevator to return, but his chance to make the slow ascent to the surface finally arrived. As the elevator cage emerged into the air at last, he felt his legs go weak.

  Everyone who worked above- or belowground was crowded around the shaft, speaking in subdued tones or standing silent as they waited for the last miners to arrive. Green was startled to see that everything was black aboveground. But for the moon, the only illumination shone up from inside the elevator shaft.

  A cheer erupted when the last miners stepped out of the lift. When the ruckus died down, Green heard a new sound kick in: the ventilator stacks behind them shuddered as the fans inside sprang back to life. A minute later, a plume of coal dust billowed up out of the elevator shaft. It thickened and grew, forcing everyone to retreat. Lights off, and the fans on backward? What was happening now?

  Green saw his shift boss pocket his telephone, and he made his way through the dispersing miners to reach him.

  “What’s going on?” Green asked.

  “Nobody knows. If it wasn’t for the lights going out, you’d think this was a false alarm.”

  “Why?”

  “The guys in the office say nobody triggered the alarm system, and none of the sensors have reported anything that would set it off …” He stopped in mid-sentence. “Do you hear that?”

  “Yeah. Something’s happening down there,” Green replied. They stepped back to the edge of the elevator shaft.

  “It sounds like the machines are working the coal faces again,” his boss said. “What do you think?”

  “That’d be my guess. But why?”

  “Dunno. This is crazy.”

  Green turned and followed the last stragglers to the parking lot. He was almost there when he felt his legs go funny under him again. But now it was because the ground was heaving beneath him. He braced himself against the surging shockwaves as the thunder of explosion after explosion erupted from the mine he’d just escaped.

  * * *

  Randal Wellhead, the Republican candidate for president, was watching a news update on his computer. The financial markets had just closed after suffering their biggest one-day losses since the Great Recession. Energy companies were still nosediving in after-hours trading, and industrials and utilities weren’t doing much better. No one knew where or what the unknown attacker would strike next.

  “Hey, Delia,” he called to his executive assistant. “You following the news?”

  A young woman in a business suit appeared at the door of his office. “Yes, sir. It’s terrible.”

  “Well, yes and no,” Wellhead said. “It’s sure awful for this country. But it’s even worse for Henry Yazzi, and that’s good for us.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very healthy way of looking at this situation, sir. And I certainly wouldn’t say that to anyone else!”

  “Oh, of course not. But if a disaster is going to happen, it might as well happen on Henry’s watch. It sure isn’t helping his election campaign any.”

  “And no one seems to have any idea who could be behind the attacks.”

  “Yup.” Wellhead chuckled. “Isn’t that great? The longer it stays that way, the more helpless the president looks.”

  * * *

  Shannon and Frank joined a somber group funneling into the conference room at NSA headquarters. The team had expanded dramatically with multiple sub-teams beavering away on different categories of incidents.

  In front stood an impatient Jim Barker, repeatedly glancing at his watch. He started speaking exactly at the top of the hour, ignoring those still arriving.

  “Okay, everyone. Let’s quiet down and get going. We’ve got a lot to cover today. As you’re already aware, the latest wave of attacks shut down forty-one major coal mines in the seven largest coal-producing countries – China, the U.S., Australia, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. We’re confident that’s a complete attack list. Every country has been hit so many times nobody’s holding back any data.

  “All the targets were underground mines, not open-pit ones. The combined output is enormous – about seventeen and a half percent of global coal production. We hustled Graham Bailey out to Wyoming with a team as soon as we realized the extent of the attacks, so I want to start with an on-site update by speakerphone. Graham, can you hear me?”

>   “Yes, Jim. How am I coming through?”

  “Just fine. Can you bring us up to date?”

  “Sure. We can only see the big picture so far. The damage underground was colossal, so there aren’t many sensors down there still providing any data, or any way to get to most of the mine. But we have been able to piece together a lot from the miners’ accounts and from data received aboveground before the explosions wiped everything out. Here’s the sequence of what we think happened.

  “As far as the miners are concerned, the incident began when the underground emergency alarms went off. It doesn’t look like there was any individual or condition that triggered the alarms. So, we expect the attacker did that to empty the mines. Whether that was to avoid loss of life or to prevent anyone from overriding later events, we just don’t know.

  “According to multiple accounts, the lights shut down in each tunnel as soon as the last miner was out. We assume that was intended to maximize confusion and speed up the evacuation.

  “Once the mines were emptied, the elevators were disabled to prevent reentry. At the same time, the ventilation systems cycled through a complex series of reconfigurations. Some fans were just blowing air through tunnels, and others were preventing air from leaving the mine the way it normally would. As some of you may know, coal dust is highly combustible. When it’s suspended in the air in an enclosed space, it becomes explosive. Federal safety regulations mandate ways to minimize the danger, like sealing off areas where mechanical mining machines are in operation, monitoring the amount of dust accumulating in the air, and constantly venting it out of the mine. All those safeguards appear to have been reversed by the attacker.

  “At the same time as the ventilators came back online, the attacker activated all underground robotic mining machines and moved them back into contact with the coal faces. That generated more and more coal dust, which the ventilators spread throughout the mine and kept stirred up and airborne. Basically, the attacker turned each mine into a gigantic octopus of a bomb. After about fifteen minutes, it set the bomb off by sending a huge power surge into the belowground systems to create sparks when machinery short-circuited.”