Going Dark(21)
“Earth Liberation Front,” Frank said. “Your guy infiltrated an ELF cell?”
“A month ago, there was a cyber incursion at Turkey Point. They left this image behind on all the computer screens in the power plant, and it stayed there for a couple of days until Homeland’s tech guys managed to remove it.”
Frank was silent, eyes on the road ahead.
“I know what you’re thinking, Frank. No one advised you of this either. But how it happened, Nuclear Regulatory bounced it to me because they knew I was running an operation on ELF. I passed it up my chain. After that, like I said, it was their call who to alert.”
“Your agency is under our jurisdiction, the Bureau’s. I should’ve heard about this every step along the way.”
“I’m just telling you what happened.”
He considered it a moment. “Well, shit. I’m halfway out the door. I shouldn’t be pissed nobody copies me on these things.”
“But you’re pissed anyway.”
He looked at her and smiled. “Relatively pissed, yes. Six on the ten-point scale.”
Frank knew all about ELF. An arm of Earth First! ELF activists were arsonists mainly. They favored primitive explosive devices to burn down ritzy housing developments built on sensitive lands, and SUV dealerships that specialized in gas hogs. They staged attacks on animal-testing labs, spiking ancient redwoods to shut down logging operations.
All loose-knit, no central command. A mishmash of beliefs. Animal liberators, anticapitalists, green anarchists, deep ecologists, ecofeminists. The entire array of next-generation revolutionaries. Everyone doing his or her thing. Save the earth, fuck the exploiters, punish the land developers, stop urban sprawl.
Business leaders upset over their economic losses had pressured the Bureau for years and finally bullied it into lumping together ELF and Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front and a few others like them and promoting them to the top of the list, ranking their kind as the number one domestic terrorist threat.
Not the Aryan Nations or the Islamic Brothers, not the twenty-odd militias in Idaho and Michigan and Colorado, wingnuts armed to the earlobes with rocket launchers and assault weapons, targeting cops and judges and abortion doctors, just waiting their chance to bring the federal government crashing down.
No, ecowarriors were number one.
Pure silliness, as far as Sheffield was concerned. Sure, their dollar totals were up in the 40 million range, mostly from burning down those posh resorts in Aspen and trashing cosmetics-testing plants, but they’d never killed anyone and seemed to be trying their best to keep it that way. They were a bunch of idealistic merry pranksters. A ragtag assortment of dope smokers with a badass green streak. Most of the few hundred criminal acts attributed to them were so minor league, it was a stretch to call them criminal at all. He kept it to himself, but Frank could even work up a mild sympathy for their cause. He wasn’t a big fan of urban sprawl.
“Apparently,” McIvey said, “whoever hacked the plant’s system wasn’t trying to crash the reactors or cause a meltdown or anything catastrophic. Besides leaving this screen saver behind, looks like their mission was exploratory, testing the plant’s cyber defenses. A probe of some kind, digital snooping. Possibly to identify vulnerabilities, what they call ‘susceptible nodes.’ Like this might be stage one, a warm-up for the main event. Or it could be just a one-shot deal. Thumbing their nose. A head fake. Pretending interest in Turkey Point, but planning to strike somewhere else.”
She blew through the tollbooth’s SunPass lane.
“You’re running a covert operation in my backyard. Withholding information about a security breach at the largest nuclear facility in Florida. In case you didn’t know, our South Florida Field Office has a cybersecurity task force, a WMD task force, we cover all those bases. Our guys are the best.”
“You want the truth, my opinion, it’s politics. People above me kept everyone in the dark so NIPC can score a takedown. Justify our existence.”
National Infrastructure Protection Center, that was her agency. Frank had watched it all mushroom since the Twin Towers were hit, an explosion of federal programs under the aegis of Homeland Security. NIPC identified and analyzed threats and vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. Electrical grids, bridges, roads, water systems, highways, railways, navigable waterways, airports, the Internet and phone systems. Anything that moved people or power or goods and services or information. The grid police.
Huge mandate that overlapped with about five other existing agencies, including work the FBI had been doing for most of Frank’s career. All that growth was supposed to improve interagency communication, but what it did was make the turf wars even more bitter than pre-9/11. Another reason he’d decided to pull the rip cord, float back to a life of full-time Hawaiian shirts.