At ten to eight Eleanor put her phone in locker fourteen, then her coat, slammed the door, and took the key.
The card with Samantha’s handwriting on it was in her coat pocket.
The secure room was twenty feet by thirty with no windows, a long table, and a wall of screens that could show you anyone in the government who was sitting in a secure room. Josh Farris, who ran the link for NIST, had already put up eleven faces in eleven boxes on one of the big screens.
“Morning, Dr. Voss.”
“Morning, Josh. Is Treasury on?”
“Treasury’s always on.”
Paul Oduya was in the center box, in the big room at the Eisenhower building, with a flag behind him that somebody had positioned in the frame on purpose. He was around fifty and had run three of these councils for two administrations. He was good at getting rooms to agree to easy things. Beyond that, she didn’t think he was that impressive.
At eight exactly he read the preamble. At the end of it he looked into the camera.
“Before we begin. Any member with a contact to disclose under section four?”
Nobody said anything. Eleanor waited until it was her turn in the silence.
“None,” she said.
It was true enough, even though she still felt a lingering doubt about it.
The FBI went first. A deputy assistant director whose name Eleanor did not catch spent twenty minutes on the manhunt. Four hundred and twelve personnel in Colorado. Aircraft. Road closures in three counties. No contact with the two founders since the night of the event. A photograph of Samantha at seventeen appeared on one of the screens.
Eleanor looked at it and then down at her pad. She had said None four minutes earlier. She wrote the date at the top of the page, slowly, and underlined it.
It was the stupidest twenty minutes of the day, so far. But the day had just begun, so she knew there would be competition, probably even on this call.
Fort Meade went next. Bratton was the one who had argued for an hour to get the word moderate into Annex C, and he looked tired. He walked them through it slowly. A sustained factoring effort, weeks old, crude, expensive, aimed at the legacy root that sat under everything that could not be updated. Assessed with moderate confidence to be state-directed.
“How long before they have it?” somebody asked.
“We can’t say.”
“Guess.”
“Weeks,” Bratton said. “Possibly less. I won’t put that in writing.”
At ten-thirty Oduya put the draft memo on another screen. It was already twenty-six pages. They tediously went through it page by page. On page nineteen it said operators should prioritize internet-facing systems in the rotation — the web, the payment networks, the clouds — and then proceed in order of exposure.
Eleanor raised her hand.
“That’s the wrong order.”
“Go ahead, Eleanor.”
“The internet-facing systems can rotate. They’ll rotate in weeks, whatever we write. The browsers are already doing it and the banks will do it the minute Treasury tells them to. The things that can’t rotate are the ones with the old root burned into them. Physical equipment. Controllers. Medical stuff. Anything you can’t reach with anything but a technician. You can’t move them up the list because they aren’t on it. They aren’t easily accessible without a person and a screwdriver. So we have to protect them first, some other way, before we spend a month congratulating ourselves on rotating the web.”
“Protect them how?” Heller said from Treasury.
Mark Heller was precise and humorless and had written the forty-page paper that said nothing too specific. Eleanor thought he was the most useful person on the wall. She could not stand him.
“Off the network where you can. Freeze the vendors’ update channels. Build a list, by hand if necessary, of every one of them in every hospital, warehouse, substation, and any other place they are installed. When messages start arriving that say they’re from the manufacturer, we have to take them offline until we solve this, and by having a master list, at least we know where to look and who to contact.”
“That’s not a rotation, that’s a moratorium.”
“Yes.”
Maureen Pell from CISA jumped in. Eleanor liked Maureen. She was blunt, she was tired, and she had been right about almost everything for as long as Eleanor had known her.
“Eleanor, I have a draft advisory going out tomorrow morning to every hospital in the country,” Maureen said. “It tells them to keep their devices running. You want me to tell them to take a pump off a patient? A pump that works?”
“I want you to tell them it can’t be trusted.”
“It can’t be trusted in a month. It can be trusted today. If I pull it today, somebody dies today. I’m not writing that.”
“They’re going to aim at the tail,” Eleanor said. “Whoever is doing this can read a calendar as well as we can. The front will move in weeks. The tail won’t move at all. By the time they have the key, the tail is all it opens.”
Nobody answered that directly. Oduya let it sit and then asked Heller how long the payment networks could run on voice confirmation before settlement failed. Heller said two days, possibly three. After that it went round the table.
It took four hours. She tried again in language she thought Treasury might understand.
“Mark, think of it as counterparty risk. You clear the front, and you’re left with the one counterparty you can’t audit.”
“I can’t audit an infusion pump, Eleanor,” Heller said. “That’s my point.”
She tried it in a hospital administrator’s voice, and Maureen answered her with bed counts. Maureen argued with her the whole way, fairly and with numbers. Bratton said nothing at all, which Eleanor viewed as typical. He wasn’t going to comment until the answer was either obvious or a decision had been made.
At twelve-fifteen they broke for lunch. Josh went and got sandwiches from somewhere and brought her a turkey on wheat and a coffee without asking.
She used the secure phone in the corner to call Oduya directly. He picked up on the second ring, eating.
“Paul.”
“You’re right, Eleanor,” he said before she could start. “But Treasury won’t sign a document that puts the front second, and CISA won’t sign one that tells hospitals to unplug. Two agencies walking out of this council right now is worse than page nineteen being stupid.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. It is.” He chewed. “I’ll put your objection in the minutes.”
“The minutes are classified.”
“That’s why the objections go there. So no one can read them.”
She hung up and ate half the sandwich. Her knees hurt from sitting since eight. She had been awake since three, and she was angry.
At two-thirty the cleared members left and the industry people came on, and it all started over at a lower classification. Four vendors, two cloud companies, a woman from one of the browsers, and a man representing the CA/Browser Forum who talked about ballots. They argued about whether the memo said should or must. They argued about the word prioritize for thirty-five minutes. She had a new stupidest thing of the day.
At four Eleanor asked for one sentence at the bottom of page nineteen. Operators of devices that cannot be updated in the field should begin a complete inventory of those devices immediately. The man from the CA/Browser Forum said inventory was out of scope for this document. The woman from the browser company said she didn’t see the harm. By four-twenty the sentence said operators are encouraged to consider an inventory, and it had moved to a footnote.
Eleanor let it go. A footnote was more than she had at lunch.
At a quarter to five she went to the ladies’ room. The corridor had a long skylight over it. It was dark. Rain was hammering on the glass so hard she could hear it through the ceiling. Somewhere west of town it was thundering. She stopped under the skylight and looked up.
It would be worse up on the divide if there was a storm happening there also. It would be coming down sideways and cold. If Samantha was above treeline and there was a storm, she was having a worse day than Eleanor was. If she was anywhere at all.
Eleanor stood there until the rain eased off, then went back in.
At seven-oh-five Oduya read the title. Interim Coordination Guidance for Accelerated Cryptographic Transition. Thirty-one pages. Page nineteen said operators should prioritize internet-facing systems. He asked whether any member objected to its adoption.
Eleanor sat quietly. No one objected.
“Thank you all,” Oduya said. “This was a hard day and a good document.”
Josh shut down the video link.
“That was a lot,” he said.
“Go home, Josh. Have a beer. Play with your dog if you have one.”
She got her coat and her phone out of locker fourteen. The card was still in the pocket. The phone had forty-one messages but nothing from anyone she wanted to hear from. She stood in the lobby and opened the scheduling page for the machine in Ohio, which took two tries on her phone.
The gray bar was still there on Thursday.
“Fuck,” Eleanor said, quietly, to nobody, and went out to her car.