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“Senator, respectfully, it’s not a matter of grounding airplanes and taking missiles offline. The system that brings fresh water into your house is controlled by computer. Same with the system that manages sewage. The electrical grid is dependent on computers. Local, regional, national, and global communications. Oil wells. Televisions. Traffic lights. Vending machines. Food transportation and refrigeration. Automatic locks. Medical care. The limousine you arrived in. The watch you’re glancing at now. There isn’t a facet of modern life that doesn’t rely on computer control at some level.

“So when you ask what is required to guarantee our safety from another December 1st, the only answer I can give is this: buy a rifle and move to a cave.”

—FBI “CYBER CZAR” GISELA BRACQ, TO THE UNITED STATES SENATE

CHAPTER 6

Normally she liked the train. It was something about the dissonance between the seeming stillness of the ride and the dizzy blur of the outside world. The juxtaposition was comforting—symbolic, perhaps, of the way she chose to live. But today all of Shannon’s focus was on one of her oldest friends, and whether she would be able to kill him.

She’d been back in the Holdfast for more than a week, watering her fake plant and staring out the windows of her unlived-in apartment, when Erik had asked her to come see him. Her studio was in Newton and he lived in Tesla, but when the world’s richest man called, one hopped, and so she’d gotten on a glider and met him that afternoon.

His idea had been intriguing.

No, sweetie. Learning a favorite author has a new book is intriguing. A restaurant you’ve never tried is intriguing. Nick’s smile when you shot the guard who had the drop on him was intriguing.

This is something else.

“Statistically poor,” Epstein had said. “83.7 percent chance of failure to capture John Smith alive. 77.3 percent chance of failure to kill him. 65.1 percent chance of situation reversal, possibly resulting in your death.”

“You know, you and John are a lot alike,” Shannon had said.

“Negative. We comprise dramatically different personality matrices—”

“Maybe,” Shannon said. “But one thing you have in common. You both really suck at pitching me jobs.” It was only the second time she’d met Erik, the real Erik, not his brother Jakob, who was the public face of the man. The first time had been nine days ago, when she delivered a drugged and broken Soren Johansen to him. Cooper had asked her to, believing that Soren might give them leverage or information against Smith; at the time, Shannon wasn’t so sure of that, but now she wondered.

Regardless, Erik didn’t react to her jab, just slouched there, his face lit in flickers from the holographs that hung in the air around them: a topographical chart of the price of pork bellies plotted against incidents of terrorism, images of a rainstorm in the South China Sea, vector maps of bullets fired from various weapons, a time-lapse of moss creeping up a tree, news footage of a limo burning—the new president’s, Ramirez, and wasn’t it just the way that the first female prez in history nearly gets blown up two weeks after swearing the oath? This inner sanctum was a subterranean space more akin to a planetarium than an office, and while she had tried to play cool, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer lunatic volume of information. “Why would I agree to do something that is almost certainly going to get me killed?”

“The situation is increasingly fluid,” Epstein had said in a voice whiny with frustration. “Patterns rely on data, but data is shifting too quickly. Impossible to sort it, parse it, specify it. But statistically, an attack upon the Holdfast is a near certainty.”

“And you think handing over John Smith to the government will prevent that?”

“Prevent, no. Delay.”

She’d sucked air through her teeth, looked at the schematics of the light rail train that hung in front of her. “John will know I’m not with him anymore. Why would he agree to meet?”

“Temptation. Significant stakes offered.”

“What stakes?”