a hundred miles. One of the monks who found him had some medical experience and had sewn him up. All things considered, Nicholas was lucky to have received any stitches at all. In fact, he was just lucky to be alive.
He had since undergone two procedures to help improve his appearance and reduce scarring. From what Harvath could see, Nicholas was almost back to normal.
As soon as the little man was finished with what he was typing, he hit the Enter key, saying, “And a Dolly for Sue.”
Nicholas needed an extraordinary amount of computing power to do what the Carlton Group had brought him on board to do. When the NSA categorically denied him access to their massive data centers, he turned to the next best thing and hacked into Google’s.
Google had dozens of data centers around the world and more than a million servers, from right there in Reston, to places like Sao Paulo, Moscow, Milan, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Nicholas had given the ones he used most often nicknames-Spotted Elephant, Bird Fish, Charlie-in-the-Box, Ostrich Cowboy, Scooter for Jimmy, and a Dolly for Sue.
Harvath had chalked it up to eccentricity until someone in the Group had asked him if he knew the significance of Nicholas’s code name. The little man had chosen it for himself and it had been approved. Harvath figured it had some poetic meaning for him until he learned that Moonracer was the name of the winged lion that ruled the Island of Misfit Toys. He was responsible for flying around the world each night in search of unwanted toys. It was a fitting moniker.
When it became obvious that Nicholas was not going to grow any bigger, his godless Soviet Georgian parents had decided he was an embarrassment and would forever be like a stone around their necks. They no longer wanted their son and decided to get rid of him.
They made no attempt to find him a suitable, loving home. They didn’t even try to place him in an orphanage. Instead, they abandoned the boy, selling him to a brothel on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There, Nicholas was starved, beaten, and made to participate in unutterable acts no child should ever be subjected to.
It was there that Nicholas learned the true value of information. Pillow talk from the alcohol-loosened lips of the brothel’s powerful clients proved to be a gold mine, once he knew what to listen for and how to turn it to his advantage.
The women who worked in the brothel were society’s castoffs, just like Nicholas, and they took pity on him. Those ladies of the night were the first to ever treat Nicholas with respect. They became the only family he had ever known, and he repaid their kindness one day by securing their freedom. He had the madam who ran the brothel, along with her husband, dispatched for the inhuman cruelty he had suffered at their hands.
Though he moved beyond the horrors of his youth, he never forgot them. He carried with him a tremendous burden of shame. He was no angel. He had done many bad things since leaving the brothel in Sochi. He had done many good things as well, particularly with the vast amount of money he had made and lost over the years. He wanted to cleanse himself. Whether that was possible, only time would tell. Agreeing to come to work with Harvath was a step in that direction.
Pushing his chair back from the desk, he reached his tiny arms into the air and arched his back. Lowering them, he turned to face his friend. “I’m sorry about Uppsala,” he said.
“Me, too,” replied Harvath, nodding toward the minifridge on the opposite wall.
Nicholas nodded. “Help yourself.”
Crossing over to it, he opened the door and peered inside. “Does the Old Man know you’ve got a bottle of wine in here?”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, with the hours I’ve been putting in, I deserve a drink now and again.”
“Do you have any beer?” asked Harvath.
“Do I look like I’ve suddenly turned into a beer drinker?”
Though a man of diminutive stature, Nicholas had perhaps the best taste of anyone Harvath had ever met. From clothes to wine and food, Nicholas was a connoisseur of all the good things life had to offer-and that included beer. Harvath had sat and drunk with him before. “Seriously, you don’t have any beer?” Harvath asked.
“It was hard enough getting the wine in here without Carlton knowing. Five percent per volume versus twelve. You do the math.”
Wine packed a stronger punch than beer. Harvath got it. He settled on a Red Bull instead and closed the fridge door.
“I thought you didn’t drink that stuff anymore,” said Nicholas.
“Only in emergencies,” he said, popping the lid and rolling a chair over. “Like when there’s no beer.”
Nicholas smiled and made room for him. “How’s Chase? I heard he got shot in the shoulder.”
“Bicep,” Harvath corrected, pointing at his own. “I think it hit the bone. He’ll be riding the bench for a while. So,” he continued, changing the subject, “the Old Man says you’ve made some progress?”
“I have,” replied Nicholas, as he pulled up an instant message screen and typed a note to the Old Man that Harvath had arrived.
“Is he still in the office?”
“Yeah. He wanted me to let him know when you got here so we could go over everything together.”
“While we’re waiting for him, why don’t you give me the thirty-thousand-foot view of the situation?”
Nicholas nodded and turned back to his computers. Moving his little fingers across the keyboard, he brought up a series of images on the screens around the SCIF. “In the early 1990s, the Chinese watched in utter fascination at how rapidly the United States defeated Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War.
“They realized that there was absolutely no way they could ever meet the technologically advanced American military on the conventional battlefield and win. They also realized something else. As they studied how the United States had waged its wars, they saw that leaps in technological innovation drove innovation in American military tactics. Not the other way around.
“The Chinese considered this quite a profound discovery and began to embrace the idea that in a China- versus-America conflict, the inferior China could beat the superior United States. In fact, China’s defense minister, General Chi Haotian, even stated that war with the U.S. was inevitable and that China would not be able to avoid it. He posited that the key issue for the Chinese armed forces was going to be controlling the initiative, or how the war would be fought. It would all come down to how each side approached waging war. China knew exactly what their plan would be. Their blueprint became known as unrestricted warfare.
“The first and most important rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules. Nothing is forbidden. The plan calls for merciless, unconventional out-of-the-box thinking. The key is asymmetrical attacks on every sphere of American life-political, economic, and social.
“Using the ancient martial doctrines of leaders like Sun Tzu, they focused on the time-proven methods of surprise and deception, particularly by weaponizing civilian technologies and employing them without morality, mercy, or limit in order to crush American society.”
“What do you mean by weaponizing civilian technologies?” asked Harvath.
“What is one of the most important technologies that touches every single home and business in America?” said Nicholas.
Harvath thought about it for a moment and replied, “The Internet.”
“You are correct, but the Internet is the second most important. The first is electricity. If electricity were weaponized, meaning an opponent had found a way to use it against the United States, America would be devastated. Without electricity, fuel doesn’t get pumped, trucks don’t move, food and drugs don’t get delivered, the economy comes to a grinding halt. As the economy grinds to a halt, society starts to break apart. Fires don’t get extinguished, looting and crime doesn’t get stopped, you pick up the phone to dial 911 and there is no dial tone. Soon there are no police, there are no firemen. All there is, is chaos.
“With power grids and power stations so dependent on the Internet, I would argue that losing the Internet to an army of hackers would have the same effect as an enemy turning off our electricity, either through widespread sabotage or with an electromagnetic pulse weapon.
“The Chinese military leaders who developed the unrestricted warfare plan explained that in the realm of low-intensity conflict, the vulnerabilities of the United States actually become exponentially more pronounced. In essence, there are multitudes of things that U.S. citizens believe are harmless that a clever enemy could turn
