The comment brought him up short. He looked at me for a second, trying to decide if I was nuts or worth the risk to bring into the hallowed hall of the Oversight Council. He shook his head. “I’m going to regret this. Follow me.”
We entered the conference room, and even I was a little awed by the talent around the table, starting with President Warren at the head. All were looking at me expectantly, except Brookings, the secretary of state. He was glowering like he wanted to castrate me.
President Warren said, “Hello, Pike. I understand you have something you urgently want to tell us.”
I wasted no time, spilling out everything I had found. The information caused a ripple in the room. Nobody said a word for a minute, all trying to assimilate the intel. I ended with, “You need to let my team loose. Let us go get them.”
That caused Brookings to come out of his coma. “Bullshit. No way is Project Prometheus doing anything domestically. We have law enforcement for this. They’re already tracking the Cyrus Mace angle, with a manhunt for the explosives under way. All we have to do is redirect them.”
I went from him, to the president, to Kurt. “No offense, but it took me damn near an hour to just get inside here. There’s no way you can get the correct information into the system in time to stop this.”
“Stop what?” Brookings said. “We have no indication you’re right. Just your say-so. Even if it’s true, the attack may be days away. We have plenty of time to stop it.”
President Warren raised his hand, causing everyone to shut up.
“First, let’s get this information out. Right now.” He pointed at Alexander Palmer, the national security advisor. “Track these guys and see what they find.” Palmer started to leave the room, when I held out the document Holly had created, saying, “Sir… here. This is law enforcement speak.”
President Warren said, “Kurt, what do you think?”
Kurt said, “We need to get an assessment of our vulnerabilities. Figure out what they’re actually going to hit. The grid’s a big fucking thing. We need to neck it down instead of randomly guessing what they’re planning to hit.”
President Warren nodded, turning to the director of the CIA. “Get that egghead you had brief me a year ago on infrastructure vulnerabilities. The guy from the National Academy of Sciences. VTC him in here.”
We waited while the video-teleconferencing bridge was established, me pacing back and forth while we wasted time. Eventually, the Tandberg secure VTC came to life, with a guy on the other end looking exactly like the stereotypical absentminded professor. Wild hair, Coke-bottle glasses, and a twitchy demeanor. All he was missing was a white lab coat and a pocket protector.
He said, “Hello, sir. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
President Warren got right to the point. “You gave me a briefing on our critical vulnerabilities last year, but I need some specifics on the power grid. If a terrorist group was going to attack that, how could they do the most damage?”
“Well, that all depends on what they bring to the table. I mean, if they had an airplane, they could fly it into a nuclear plant, or if they had car bombs, they could—”
Warren cut him off. “We don’t have time for this. Say they have multiple small teams with explosive packets and the means to penetrate any security. What would they hit?”
The egghead looked nonplussed for a moment, clearly wanting to pontificate for a while but brought up short by the urgency in the president’s voice.
“Well, the best thing to hit would be our extremely high voltage transformers. You knock those out, and certain areas would be out of power for a while. But there’s no way to systemically bring down the entire grid now. After 2003, we started going to smart-grid technology. They could do some damage, but the grid’s fairly self- healing.”
President Warren said, “What about our nuclear facilities? Seems like that would be the logical place to hit.”
“Yes, sir, in a perfect world, but every nuclear plant has an enormous amount of security, and not just from someone who intentionally means harm. We built those things to withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, and anything else that can be thrown against them. In fact, the sites themselves
President Warren said, “‘Fairly quickly’ is a worthless phrase. Especially in today’s economy. They poke enough nuclear plants, and the impact would be catastrophic even if every attack was a failure.”
The egghead continued, “I wouldn’t worry about a nuclear facility, if you really want to know what’s going to hurt. As I said, the EHVTs are the way to go.”
President Warren said, “Why? It’s just a piece of equipment. Why is that so bad?”
“Because we don’t have any spares.”
“What do you mean?”
“EHVTs are enormous things, made one at a time, with most being made for a specific power system. They aren’t built all the same, sort of like a carburetor in a car. You can’t go to the NAPA auto store and say, ‘Give me a carburetor.’ You have to give the make and model of the car. EHVTs are the same, except there aren’t any NAPAs to buy them at, and they take six months to build. We don’t do that in America anymore. All EHVTs are made overseas, with a backlog of six months. Most U.S. energy companies keep a couple on hand, but if you took out more than we had to spare, you’d permanently alter our ability to provide power to an area.”
President Warren said, “So that’s what they’d hit? The EHVTs?”
“That would be my guess, but even then, it’s small potatoes. Taking them out individually would cause local power outages, but what you’d really want is a shutdown of the entire grid, with the EHVTs being the lynchpin. That can’t happen anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because, like I said, we’ve made the grid smart.”
When the scientist saw he wasn’t convincing anyone, he began speaking to us like we were children. “Look. The country is split into three zones — the Eastern, Western, and Texas interchanges. It should be neat, but it’s really not. Even between these zones, there are interchanges, and in fact, as we saw in 2003, our system impacts other countries, such as Canada. The problem with all of this is that electricity is an instant demand. We don’t store it, like oil. It’s produced and used instantly. The demand is constantly fluctuating, with the grid providing the response. If you interrupt that flow, you cause a ripple effect. If one substation that’s used to distribute power is taken off-line, then the burden is switched to another substation. If you take out that substation as well, you overpower the next substation tasked with taking on the additional burden, and it takes itself off-line before it does damage to itself. When that happens, the entire flow is shifted to another station, with exponential effects. Eventually, every single substation shuts down because it can’t handle the flow, like what happened in 2003.”
I spoke up. “You keep mentioning 2003. Forgive me, but I was out of the country for most of that year. What do you mean?”
The egghead focused on me like I was a simpleton, and said, “The blackout of 2003? You don’t remember that?”
“I wasn’t here. And had other things to worry about. Like getting shot at.”
“Well, I was getting to it anyway, because it’s why we don’t really have to worry about an attack against the grid anymore. Believe it or not, in 2003 a tree branch caused one high-voltage power line to short out, then what I just described happened. The northeastern seaboard — along with sections of Canada — went without power for three days, at an estimated cost of ten billion dollars. Along with a lot of deaths.”
I said, “Why don’t we need to worry about that now?”
“Because we learned from that experience and developed solutions. The old system simply shunted all power to the next available substation, which eventually became overpowered. Now we have a smart grid, wherein the system itself tests where best to put the load, then does so. No single substation is overpowered.”
I said, “So even if you took out the EHVTs, you wouldn’t cause a blackout?”
“Oh, you’d cause a blackout, but just not nationwide. It would be restricted to the area that was serviced.
