“I thought those controllers were designed to be invulnerable. Triple fail-safe.”
“They are. That’s what’s so worrisome,” said Tildy. “Triconex controllers are a lock-and-key system. You can’t get into it remotely; there has to be physical contact.”
“So it was an inside job.”
“That’s the problem. It wasn’t. Somehow they infected the system from the outside. We don’t know how. A magic trick. They were intending to blow the place up, but something went wrong, a tiny flaw in the implant, now probably repaired.”
“I didn’t know the Iranians had that capacity.”
“They don’t. It was Russia.”
Garcia looked perplexed. “Why? I mean, I can see that Russia would look at the Saudis as oil competitors, but that’s taking the game a little far.”
“We thought at first they were just doing it as a favor for the Iranians, or maybe for the money. Now we think it was a test. But here’s the deal. Similar controllers are on tens of thousands of systems all over the world, especially in the U.S. They’re in our nuclear plants, our power plants, our refineries, our water-treatment plants. Think what that means: oil spills, gas leaks, explosions, vital equipment tearing itself apart, and imagine what happens if a nuclear plant melts down. We knew they were targeting our infrastructure, but we thought we were ahead of them, or at least even, but we miscalculated. Terribly.”
“It’s diabolical, but brilliant,” Garcia said. “Find the one system that is supposed to be tamper proof, the very thing that is supposed to prevent a catastrophe, and turn it into a bomb.”
Tildy nodded. He got it.
“Is there more?”
“You’ll have to find out.”
“By asking me here, you’re saying there is.”
“I’m suggesting that you consider what might be possible under such circumstances.”
The pizza arrived. Garcia took a sip of the beer that Tildy had ordered for him and waited until the server departed. “If they can get into one system, especially one that sophisticated and supposedly tamper proof, who’s to say they haven’t compromised others? I’m sure you’ve thought about that.”
Tildy stared at him.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Garcia said. “I mean, it’s obvious. And jeez, it’s like a one-button operation, shut the fucking country down, right? Not just a headache but a mortal blow. Take years to recover.”
Tildy did not respond. She had come to the edge of her safety zone. She stood up and left Garcia with the pizza and the bill.
10
Stoning the Devil
Henry gripped the handrail as the little Boeing helicopter bumped over a mountain peak. He had never liked helicopters. Nor was he happy about heights.
From the air, he could see the sun setting over the Red Sea, darkening the land below. Then Mecca appeared before him, a brilliant island of light. Skyscrapers ringed the Grand Mosque, which was lit up like Yankee Stadium. In the center, inside an arena of what appeared to be glaringly white beach sand, was a great black box, the Kaaba, the focus of Muslim prayers around the world. Suddenly the sand shifted like a great wave as three million worshippers rose from the sunset prayer.
“Can we get closer?” Henry said.
“Henry, have you become a Muslim? It is forbidden to nonbelievers.”
Henry looked over at Prince Majid at the controls. He was grinning. “I can accept your conversion. It’s very easy.” His voice came through surprisingly crisply on the headset.
“You know my position on religion,” Henry said.
“If you insist to remain an infidel, we will have to land at our police outpost, as I intended. There,” he said, pointing at a tented compound on a hillside overlooking the city. “We have a good view from that point.”
Henry and Majid had known each other since 2013, when Majid had come to Geneva to report on an epidemic in Saudi Arabia the year before. Ron Fouchier, the great virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, was the first to describe the disease, a coronavirus called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS. Forty-four people had fallen ill in the initial outbreak, and half of them died. The disease subsequently broke out in South Korea, affecting about 180 people. Researchers discovered that MERS was endemic in camels, although it wasn’t clear whether the animals got the disease from people or vice versa. An odd feature was that 80 percent of the human victims were male. Why was that? It was Majid who discovered that the virus was ferried along by dust, and that women who wore veils were partially protected—a brilliant deduction that caught Henry’s attention.