Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

John Skow and the president's chief of staff followed the general. The three men walked fifteen meters from the door and stopped. They probably never saw Ravi in the darkness.

"I hope to God you've got some kind of plan, General," said Ewan McCaskell. "Because evacuating this place doesn't do a damned thing for Washington."

"I've got a plan. But I don't think I'm the only one. Skow?"

The NSA man nodded. "We can kill Trinity."

"How?"

"Isolate it from the Internet. That's the same as killing it."

"Talk fast."

"When Godin died, the computer crashed and the Russian missiles launched. Cause and effect, right?"

General Bauer nodded.

"Trinity has to be sending out some sort of safety sig¬nal. A constant signal telling certain computers that all is well with Trinity. When Godin died, that signal was dis¬rupted, and the Russian missiles were launched. If we can separate that 'all is well' signal from the rest of Trinity's output, we can probably duplicate it. Then all we have to do is feed our own version into the data line Trinity is using and cut Trinity's power. Trinity will be dead, but the computers tasked with retaliation will have no idea anything is wrong."

"How long would it take you to isolate that signal?"

"I don't know. Trinity would detect any direct moni¬toring of its lines, so we'd have to do it from outside the cables. That causes distortion. And since the signal is generated by and for computers, it's probably very com¬plex. It might even appear random to us without intense analysis."

"How long? "

The NSA man shrugged. "It could take ten minutes or ten days."

"We'll be dead long before you do that. And Washington will no longer exist."

The beat of rotor blades reverberated over the com¬pound. McCaskell looked skyward, then at General Bauer. "Is that helicopter coming to evacuate us?"

"No. It's coming for you."

Puzzlement wrinkled McCaskell's face. "Why?"

"Our EMP strike failed because our communications were compromised. But the plan was sound."

"Do you have another bomber in the air?"

"We don't need one. We have ICBMs sitting in silos in Kansas cornfields right now. One of those can reach the necessary altitude for an EMP detonation in three hundred seconds."

"That's five minutes," said Skow. "An eternity in Trinity's terms. And Trinity will detect the launch imme¬diately."

General Bauer nodded. "We'll inform Trinity of what we're doing just prior to launch. We’ll say the president has decided he can't survive politically if he doesn't respond to the Russian missile detonated off Virginia. We'll remotely retarget the missile for Moscow, and Trinity will hear our telemetry. But when it reaches the peak of its boost phase… boom. EMP."

Skow's face shone with admiration. "That could work."

"But we can't launch an ICBM from here," McCaskell said.

"We're not. The president's going to launch it. He's got the nuclear briefcase with him, and he's with the Joint Chiefs. They'll know the necessary altitude and yield for an EMP blast."

"But they're all under surveillance!"

The helicopter was descending fast. Ravi had dreamed that a machine like this one would carry him out of harm's way, but the pounding rotor blades overhead did not soothe him. This bird was a harbinger of war.

General Bauer laid his hands on McCaskell's shoul¬ders. "Do you know a Secret Service agent you can trust? Someone who'd be in the White House and whose cell number you know?"

"Of course. But we can't transmit a word without Trin¬ity hearing it."

"Yes, we can. Our mistake has been to use our most advanced communications. Trinity is focused on those. We need to do it the old-fashioned way."

"Telephone," said Skow.

"Right. Lockheed has a research lab six miles west of here. If you use a land line from there, and you don't use key words like Trinity, the computer would have to sift through massive amounts of data to find the conversa¬tion. It's like hiding hay in a haystack."

Skow was nodding excitedly.

Bauer stayed focused on McCaskell. "Call your Secret Service man and tell him that unless the president and the Chiefs are moved to the White House bomb shelter, they'll be vaporized. He should say that on camera, so that Trinity can hear it. As soon as the president is clear of surveillance, you get him on the phone and explain what he has to do. He and the Chiefs can launch the missile on their way to the bomb shelter."

The thunder of the approaching helicopter was drown¬ing the conversation.

"General!" McCaskell shouted. "If an EMP pulse will knock down an ICBM, what will it do to commercial airliners?"

"Airliners have redundant hydraulic systems! They'll lose electrical power, but they'll be able to land just fine. You've got to go now, sir. The president has less than fif¬teen minutes to live."

A Black Hawk gunship painted in desert camouflage set down thirty meters from the hangar.

"Go!" Bauer yelled.

McCaskell turned and ran for the waiting chopper. A soldier pulled him up into its belly, and the Black Hawk lifted into the night sky.

"I can't believe he bought that," said Skow.

"What?"

"Older planes like 727s and DC-9s have redundant hydraulics, but newer models are fully computerized. They won't make it. There are probably three thousand airliners aloft right now. The passenger load is at least a hundred thousand people. If only half of them crash, that's twenty times the casualties of the World Trade Center. We'll have bodies strewn from Maine to California."

"Experienced pilots will be able to set down on the interstates," General Bauer said.

"In Montana, maybe. The rest will be blocked by stalled cars and trucks, and they won't move an inch without new parts. But there won't be any parts. There won't even be food moving on the roads. Not unless the National Guard moves it. And they'll be too busy shoot¬ing looters and delivering water to do that."

General Bauer looked fiercely at the NSA man. "If that missile had hit Norfolk, we'd be looking at two mil¬lion dead. Two million."

Skow nodded soberly.

"And if we don't knock down the next two, you can scratch off three million souls in and around Washington. Including your wife and kids, if I'm not mistaken."

The NSA man looked stricken.

"Now, you get somebody working on finding Trinity's 'all is well' signal. Because if we don't get our bone marrow fried by a neutron bomb in the next four¬teen minutes, we just might need it."

CONTAINMENT

The black sphere of Trinity pulsed with blue light as the lasers inside fired into its crystal memory. Given the enor¬mous capacity and speed of the computer, I could not begin to imagine how many trillions of bits of data it had to be manipulating to cause such activity. Was it monitor¬ing the military status of every nuclear-armed nation? Scanning and analyzing every square meter of the earth visible to satellites? Was it searching obscure astrophysics theses for references to the concepts I had been talking about? Or was it patiently writing a perfect symphony while we awaited nuclear disaster? Perhaps it was doing all that simultaneously.

My original intention to persuade Trinity to shut itself down had changed under the threat of the incom¬ing missiles. I had focused instead on convincing Trinity to spare those lives under immediate threat. Yet my efforts had failed. Trinity wanted only to continue our discussion of my coma revelations. As I stood dazed before the black sphere, hoping that General Bauer was evacuating the base, the last part of my coma conversa¬tion with Trinity began to play from the hidden speakers.

"You said that when matter and energy come to an end, consciousness will survive by migrating into some¬thing else. What can it migrate into?"