into Fort Knox.
Right?
“Rats were great because nobody likes rats, not even Communists, especially dead rats dropped around garbage cans.”
Watson’s flawless brow furrowed with an unspoken question. And your point is?
“You all are digital natives,” Foley said. “You grew up with this stuff like a second language. You’re fluent in ‘Hadoop nodes’ and ‘bit lockers’ and ‘SaaS.’ My generation are digital poms.”
“Poms, ma’am?” the young analyst from the FBI Intelligence Branch asked.
“Poms. Pomegranates. Rhymes with ‘immigrants.’ It’s an Aussie word I picked up recently. It’s a tiresome way for me to say I’m a digital immigrant. I came to all of this late. I know it’s the future—heck, it’s the now—but I’m analog. I know what works for me.”
“I assure you, Madame Director, the IC Cloud works, too.” Watson didn’t pile on. They’d just spent the last two hours reviewing the stunning successes of the system in today’s quarterly meeting. Perfect operability, zero breaches.
Foley touched her tablet. “I know it does. Your data prove it.”
“But you’re still concerned,” Watson said. She was the only private-sector person in the room, and her company’s future depended on making and keeping her federal government clients happy.
“A professional habit,” Foley offered with a weary smile. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately, another hazard in her line of work. What was really bothering her? Was it her own insecurity she was worried about? Unable to keep up completely with all of the technobabble? Just feeling her age?
It was easy to dismiss someone as young and pretty as Watson. Women Foley’s age often did, for all of the wrong reasons. Youth and beauty were still the coin of the realm. But that would be a mistake. Foley had studied Watson’s file.
She was, without question, brilliant.
What had made Watson particularly interesting to the Ryan administration was her unreserved patriotism, a lamentably rare thing in the privileged corporate boardrooms of the San Francisco Bay Area. Amanda’s brother, Kyle “Rex” Watson, was a Delta sniper, killed by an eighty-two-millimeter mortar strike along with his spotter “Mutt” in Sevastopol just a few years ago during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since his death, Watson had worked tirelessly on behalf of wounded veterans and their families, winning numerous awards for her charitable work. Mary Pat’s sources told her that Watson even visited his grave at Arlington National Cemetery before today’s meeting.
No one in the room doubted Watson’s skill sets, intelligence, or patriotism, least of all Foley. But it wasn’t Watson that Foley was worried about.
A few years ago, China’s premier cyberwarfare unit, Ghost Ship, had been destroyed in a heroic bombing run by Marine Corps fighter pilots on the Chinese mainland. But China’s electronic warfare and cyberespionage cadres, including the infamous People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, had only expanded in numbers and capabilities in recent years. It wasn’t a surprise. China produced more than four million STEM graduates every year on the mainland, and many thousands of STEM students in the United States were actually Chinese nationals, some of whom were guilty of spying on the U.S. corporations and research institutions that hired them.
American corporations lost an estimated $300 billion of intellectual property to China’s cyberespionage programs, which had also successfully stolen plans related to advanced American weapons systems, including the F-35 Lightning II.
“Chinese army’s APT”—advanced persistent threat—“units have upped their game recently, investing heavily in AI-assisted hacking attacks that are escalating exponentially in frequency and scope. Tell me, Ms. Watson, doesn’t that concern you?”
“Yes, of course it does. China is, without a doubt, the single greatest cybersecurity threat we face. But right behind them are the Russians, the North Koreans, the Iranians—the list is endless. The IC Cloud’s standardized, automated, and air-gapped cloud computing system has proven to be impervious to their attacks, as I know you’re well aware, Madame Director.”
“But here’s what’s keeping me up at night, Amanda,” Foley began. “All U.S. intelligence is stored and analyzed on the IC Cloud. But the U.S. IC is intimately connected to the Five Eyes program, the Club de Berne, and EU INTCEN, among others. In short, the entire Western intelligence apparatus would be exposed if the IC Cloud was ever compromised. I can’t shake the feeling that having put all of our eggs in this one basket has created an awfully tempting target. The math isn’t on our side. The IC is currently defeating tens of millions of attacks every year—and I congratulate all of you around this table for that—but if just one of them succeeds, just one, we could suffer