Mike Maden - Drone Threat

“Isn’t that what you do?”

Werntz laughed. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I were to answer such a question, would I? And yet you and I are old friends, so I will tell you that we trust neither the Saudis nor the Russians.”

“Me neither.”

“And yet your vice president seems quite taken with both of them lately.”

“Which is why you called me and not him,” Pearce said.

“We live in such interesting times, don’t we? It’s important to remember who our true friends are.”

“I do, believe me.”

“Yes, of course you do. But does your government?”

Good question , Pearce thought.

“Please give my regards to President Myers,” Werntz said. “And President Lane as well, though I’ve yet had the good fortune to meet him.”

Pearce was frustrated that Lane’s advisors had kept the Israelis at arm’s length since his election. Powerful factions in Lane’s party were doing everything they could to ostracize the Israeli government for political and politically correct reasons. He knew Lane was sympathetic to the Israeli situation but he had a lot on his agenda these days and Israeli-American relations were a low priority at the moment. “I’ll see if I can’t fix that soon.”

“I’d be grateful, as would my ambassador. Have a wonderful day, Troy.”

“You, too, Moshe. Thanks for the heads-up. My best to your wife.”

Pearce slipped the phone into his pocket. He dug back into his breakfast, processing this new piece of information. Games within games , he said to himself.

Games they might already have lost.

Garcia parked his Mustang in front of the white stucco rental. He double-checked the address. It was correct. He was going to be late to work for sure but there was no way around it. She was crazy enough to rat him out but she was also the best lay he’d ever had. Lucky for him his current wife never checked his text messages.

Here, he texted.

Great! Come on in! I’m in the back bedroom. Get ready.

Garcia scrambled out of his car and jogged up the short brick path to the porch. He could hear faint salsa music on the other side of the heavy wooden front door. He glanced around the neighborhood but no one was there to see him. He was grateful. He saw a security camera attached to the eaves that pointed in his direction. He’d told his woman she needed to get serious about her personal security. Violent crime wasn’t just south of the I-10 these days. It pleased him that she was finally listening to him, but when he found out the front door was unlocked he was irritated again. She didn’t have any common sense. Of course, if she did, she wouldn’t be fooling around with him.

He stepped inside and called out to her but there wasn’t any response. His voice reverberated on the red terra-cotta floors. So did the music, which was much louder now that he was inside. He shut the door behind him.

The house was completely void of any furniture except for a TV dinner tray with the blaring radio. This was getting weirder by the minute. But the little blue pill had kicked in and he was in serious need of relief now. She was easily satisfied and so was he, so this wouldn’t take long. The rougher and faster he was, the more she liked it anyway.

Garcia worked his way down the hallway, where another noise caught his attention. A low hum, almost industrial. He called out her name again. No answer. At the end of the hall he saw a closed door and another security camera perched above it.

He approached the door and turned the doorknob and opened it.

His woman wasn’t there. The noise was louder.

He paled.

Oh, damn.

All eyes in the Situation Room were focused on a crudely shot cell phone video flashing on the screen. The sound was off.

“And this Garcia guy is credible?” Chandler asked.

“He’s the operations manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He’s in charge of delivering water to nearly twenty million people in the L.A. basin, so, yes, I’d say he’s credible,” Peguero said. She fast-forwarded to a large portable pump, steel pipes, and a fifty-five-gallon plastic drum. They were all connected to the larger water pipes in the bathroom wall, torn away, along with the sink. The toilet had been removed to make room for the equipment. Yellow-suited HAZMAT workers crowded in the frame. Pearce saw one of them wanding the plastic drum with a handheld Geiger counter.

“And Garcia just happened to find this rig?”

“The details of how he managed to find it are still a little sketchy. The FBI ran a quick background check. He’s not on any watch list and he doesn’t have any felony convictions. I’d say he’s above suspicion. Otherwise, why call it in?”

Peguero described how Garcia had called his number two at the MWDSC, who then alerted the head of the security team. The water district had a plan in place for just such an emergency. The FBI was immediately contacted, along with an L.A. County HAZMAT team.

“And we’re sure the water district is safe?” Chandler said.

“Not at all,” Peguero said. “What Garcia and the water people tell us is that the device found in that home hadn’t been activated. That fifty-five-gallon drum contains plutonium-239, at least according to the letter they left behind.” She froze the image and pointed to a small metal box with an antenna located on top of the pump. “We believe this is a remote-control unit designed to activate the pump on a cell phone signal.”

“How could one drum of contaminated water affect the entire water system? Aren’t there controls in place for something like this? Wouldn’t water treatment have caught it?” Grafton asked.

“This is our worst-case scenario come to life,” Eaton said, her face darkening. The former army general looked like she hadn’t slept in days. “It’s a system designed to induce a backflow contamination event into the main water supply — the water that has already passed through the treatment process and is made available for public consumption. It’s extremely simple and effective. The pump you see in the video is used to overcome the water-pressure gradient coming into the house, effectively stopping the water flow long enough to dump the contaminant in. Then the pump is shut off and the main water system itself siphons and circulates the contaminant throughout the network. In some computer simulations we’ve run, the right induction point can contaminate whole neighborhoods and even the main trunk lines before the contaminant is even detected. If this device had been activated, we think as many as ten thousand homes could have been affected.”

The room was stunned into incredulous silence. Pearce could see the gears behind everyone’s eyes as they processed the magnitude of Eaton’s words.

Pia cleared his throat. “Aren’t there backflow prevention devices looped into these networks to avoid this exact scenario? Water system attacks have occurred all over the world. I thought our people were on top of this.”

“Yes. Prevention devices are in place,” Eaton said. “But they weren’t designed for terrorist attacks. Backflow incidents are usually accidents. So the backflow devices aren’t considered strategically important. They’re often out in public and not guarded. In fact, the nearest backflow device to this house was just a half mile away. No fencing or protection of any kind. That might even be why this particular location was selected. Apparently that backflow prevention device was disabled with a low-yield remote-controlled explosion just thirty minutes before the house was discovered.”