The Leviathan Effect Read online

  Dedicated to the victims of natural disasters

  “Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters will … unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. Such actions would be more directly and truly worldwide than recent, or presumably future, wars, or the economy at any time. All this will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done.”

  —Mathematician John von Neumann, Can We Survive Technology?, 1955

  “Current technologies that will mature over the next thirty years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects.… The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together.”

  —Owning the Weather in 2025, a report produced for the US Air Force Chief of Staff in 1995

  “May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.”

  —Job 3:8

  PROLOGUE

  Chittagong District, Bangladesh, September 25, 8:17 A.M.

  DR. ATUL PRADHAN HAD just poured himself a cup of black tea when he heard what he thought was distant thunder. He glanced up curiously, saw the bright, cloudless blue sky through the second-story windows, observed the motionless leaves of the betel palms, and decided that he had been mistaken.

  But as he went to lift his tea cup, he heard the sound again. And then he began to feel it; shaking the floor boards beneath his feet, rattling the bone china cup against the saucer.

  Dr. Pradhan set his cup on the credenza and stepped out onto the teak-wood deck. He leaned on the rail of the colonial-style apartment house and saw the commotion below: people running chaotically, shouting. He looked where they were pointing—toward the blaze of sunlight to the southeast, and the palm-lined road that stretched to the long tourist beaches at Cox’s Bazaar—and he saw the crest of the first wave.

  Moments later, dark torrents of seawater pounded through the streets, smashing shop windows, sweeping away food carts and merchant stands.

  Dr. Pradhan stumbled back inside and closed the door. He stared at the tidy stack of textbooks on the Chinese oak table; his notebook opened beneath a reading lamp to a chart of twentieth-century weather patterns in the Bay of Bengal; the framed photograph of his wife and two grown daughters, taken on a mountainside in Southern India three years earlier. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony still played on the stereo.

  At 8:22, Dr. Pradhan felt the floor boards shaking again, violently this time, and he staggered to the window of his rented room. The sky suddenly darkened, and then he saw the second wave—this one much larger, at least fifty or sixty feet tall, he guessed, taking down trees and utility poles and beach shacks as it raced toward his building.

  On the streets below, people stood waist deep in seawater now, many of them screaming. He heard a man shout, “God help us!” three times. Already, bodies floated on the receding waters.

  Several blocks to the east, a four-story apartment collapsed against the rushing water. It will take down this building, too, Dr. Pradhan thought. It will take down all of these buildings. Everything along this shoreline will be swept away.

  Still, when it happened, at 8:29, the suddenness was stunning—the wood and plaster crumbling beneath him, the furious rush of cold and greasy water flushing him with it. That was when Dr. Pradhan thought about who had sent him here—the man he was scheduled to meet that afternoon. The American.

  And then, for several seconds, it seemed that he might be safe. Dr. Pradhan opened his eyes, gasping for air. He felt his face bobbing like a buoy above the current. Tasted the cold, salty water and the warm air as he kicked his legs.

  He looked up for a moment, just before the next wave took him under, and saw a white sea bird flapping frantically into the cloudless blue sky.

  It was the last thing that Dr. Atul Pradhan would ever see.

  ONE

  WHEN you AGREE TO serve at the pleasure of the most powerful man in the United States, you enter into a contract of unspecified duration and largely unstated terms. You join an elite team with only fifteen members, chosen for your experience and expertise, although everything you do during your tenure will be seen as a reflection of the man you serve. Many strong-willed and highly talented leaders have become disillusioned by the degree of scrutiny, public criticism, and compromise that go with the job.

  The trade-off is that, for a short bridge of time, you have the opportunity to help shape your country’s history. What you make of this opportunity depends on myriad factors, some of which you control, many of which control you.

  Catherine Blaine understood all of this when she agreed to accept a Cabinet post in the administration of President Aaron Lincoln Hall. It was, to people who knew her, a surprising decision—even more surprising than President Hall offering her the job. Blaine was independent-minded and had been, at times, famously outspoken. Although she’d served nearly five years in Congress, she had a low tolerance for Washington’s political machinery—its blind partisanship and storied inefficiency, in particular. On the other hand, she was a three-star general’s daughter who believed in the principles of service and loyalty. She began the job with the measured enthusiasm that most Cabinet members carried to Washington—a belief that she could bring something new to the post, that she would seize her opportunity and make a difference.

  The first seven months of Catherine Blaine’s term as secretary of Homeland Security had been unexceptional, marked by modest achievements and often weighted down by minor disappointments and frustrations.

  But on the afternoon of Sunday, October 2, all of that began to change.

  Logan County, West Virginia, 2:23 P.M.

  As the rotor blades of the UH-60 Black Hawk stopped spinning, Catherine Blaine hopped down from the right side of the helicopter cabin and loped across the asphalt parking lot of the mountain heliport, two paces behind her press secretary, Lila Hernandez, to a waiting Town Car limousine. The rains had finally stopped and the flood waters were receding, but the steel-gray skies were still thick with moisture, the trees all dripping rain.

  Blaine and Hernandez had just taken an aerial tour of a flood-engorged valley with the governor and several state emergency management officials, after a brief press conference at the capitol. They were now being whisked back to the airport, where Blaine would make a quick statement for the cameras and then board a plane to Washington.

  Jamie Griffith, Blaine’s chief of staff, was waiting in the limousine, typing on his laptop. Hernandez slid in first, followed by Blaine. Hernandez immediately pulled out her mobile to check messages.

  “How was it?” Jamie asked, without looking up.

  “Familiar,” Blaine said. The car began to move. “Dozens of homes lost. A couple hundred people will be sleeping on cots in the high school gymnasium tonight.”

  “At least we have some positive news.”

  “Yes.” At least. Blaine watched the waterlogged landscape while the Town Car climbed the rough, mountain road: Wood-frame houses set back in the sparse, shedding woods. Cars on cinderblocks. Old appliances in a clearing. A depressed area before, made much worse by the flooding.

  There was a primal beauty to this hill country, though, that Blaine understood. Even after spending years in the belly of Washington politics, after teaching political science and foreign policy at Princeton and Georgetown, she was still a mountain girl at heart, raised in the foothills of western North Carolina. These long, misty mountain vistas awakened an irresistible emotion in her.

  She was here today as the face of the federal government, and as a bearer of good news—the promise that tens of millions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Administration aid would be distr
ibuted to homeowners and renters devastated by the floods.

  Homeland Security, which oversaw FEMA, was, by definition, charged with the overall safety of US citizens and soil. It was a broad definition, encompassing everything from airport security to border patrols to natural disasters. DHS was a branch of government that hadn’t existed before March 1, 2003, its creation part of the reaction to the 9/11 attacks. With two hundred thousand employees, Homeland Security was now the third largest Cabinet department, after Defense and Veterans Affairs. Often its duties overlapped those of other Cabinet agencies.

  Blaine’s interests ran more to foreign affairs than natural disasters, but she understood that visiting flood sites went with the territory. A week earlier, she had taken a similar tour of flooded regions in rural Kentucky. In between, there had been a border inspection in Arizona, a speech to the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Seattle, and a meeting with the US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner in Wyoming—which, during an interview with a local reporter, Blaine had mistakenly called Montana.

  She gazed up now and saw the name of the town they were entering whoosh by: BENDERVILLE.

  Ahead, the patchy, potholed road flattened out among the wet trees. Travel fatigue was setting in again, and Blaine was anxious to return to Washington.

  “We are in Montana, right?” Jamie Griffith deadpanned, still looking at his laptop screen.

  Blaine smiled. She had made it clear that humor was welcome in her administration, even when it was at her expense. She was in good company, anyway: in 1982, President Reagan had famously raised his glass at a banquet in Brazil and toasted “the people of Bolivia.”

  “Did I tell you Kevin and I are finally getting away this weekend?” she said.

  “Mmmm. Not the details,” Jamie said.

  Blaine listened to her staffers’ fingers typing on their keypads, the windshield wipers slow-thumping back and forth.

  “Just a mother-son bonding thing. Planning to spend a couple days on the Shore. Biking, kayaking. Crab cakes.”

  Jamie made a grunting sound but didn’t look up. Blaine decided to just enjoy the scenery for a few minutes, reminding herself that her chief of staff had served her well over these past seven months. In fact, Jamie Griffith and Catherine Blaine had become a surprisingly effective team, even if they struck people as the odd couple: Blaine, tall and fit with dark blonde hair, green eyes, and strong classical features; Jamie, a couple of inches shorter, pasty skinned, paunchy, and perpetually disheveled. But, in fact, they weren’t what they seemed—Blaine, who gave off an air of order and efficiency, could be scattered and impulsive, while Jamie was methodical and meticulous. Griffith was a family man with two young children; Blaine, the mother of a nineteen-year-old, had occasionally struggled with the responsibilities of parenthood.

  As the limousine rolled through the gates of the tiny airport, Jamie closed his laptop and surveyed the small crowd in the parking lot—about as many media people and town officials as onlookers.

  A beat-up, lopsided lectern had been set up on an edge of the airfield. A half dozen public works crew members were lined up to the left side of the lectern, all wearing their orange municipal rain slickers. Behind the lectern was a C-20F Gulfstream twelve-seat executive transport plane, waiting to ferry them back to Reagan National.

  Jamie stepped out first and walked interference, holding out his arms to keep back a female reporter who rushed over shouting “Secretary Blaine! Secretary Blaine!”

  Blaine stopped at the lectern, leaning down to speak into the microphone, which seemed to have been set for someone four feet tall. “I’d like to commend all of the local agencies for the first-rate job you’ve done in dealing with this disaster. We’ve had a productive tour of the flooded areas, and I have assured the governor that we are fully committed to providing the necessary federal aid, including individual assistance and housing assistance.”

  She then delivered a brief message from the President and took three questions from the local media. Washington had become more diligent about its response to natural disasters ever since the chorus of criticism following Katrina in 2005; Catherine Blaine had been asked by the President to stress the government’s “commitment” to these West Virginia flood victims and she wanted to leave them with a sense of assurance that Washington would be there for them. But Blaine was thinking already about her next day’s appointments. They traveled to Ohio in the morning for a meeting on levee recertification. Then back to D.C. for a luncheon at the State Department and an afternoon briefing with the President.

  As she walked out to the plane, Catherine Blaine heard a frantic clacking of heels on the wet pavement behind her.

  “Secretary Blaine? Secretary Blaine! Could I get a quick comment from you before you go?”

  Her chief of staff quickly stepped between them, but Blaine stopped him. “It’s all right, Jamie,” she said, summoning a smile for the reporter.

  It wasn’t one of the locals, though. It was a reporter she recognized—a Washington correspondent named Melanie Cross, who wrote for the Wall Street Review.

  The reporter took a moment to catch her breath.

  “Do you have any comment, Secretary Blaine, on the reports coming out of Washington this afternoon about the security breaches?”

  “The—?” Blaine studied the reporter’s face as she repeated her question, pen poised above her notepad. An intense woman with thick dark hair, smooth, lightly freckled skin, big doe eyes. “Which reports are these now?”

  “The AP is quoting intelligence sources. Saying there have been unprecedented security breaches at CIA, Department of Defense, State Department and the White House.” She paused again to catch her breath, watching Blaine. “Do you have any comment?”

  Blaine frowned, and glanced at Jamie, who was standing at the base of the steps to the Gulfstream. She had been briefed on several cyber security breaches in recent days, but they hadn’t been “unprecedented”—and it wasn’t something that should be known by the media.

  “Is that the word they’re using—‘unprecedented?’ ”

  “Yes. That’s—” She looked again at her notepad and what seemed to be a crumpled printout of a news story. “—and I quote, um, ‘one security source characterized them as potentially the most serious cyber threats the government has ever faced.’ ”

  Blaine shook her head. “No,” she said. “I couldn’t comment on that.” She gazed at the printout in the reporter’s hand, which fluttered in the wet breeze. “Is that the story? Could I have a look?”

  Instead of showing it to her, though, Melanie Cross continued to read, her damp hair falling over her face. “ ‘Unprecedented cyber breaches at Department of Defense and the State Department.’ Um, let’s see, ‘renewing fears that the country may be vulnerable to an attack that could paralyze power grids across America.’ ”

  Blaine shook her head. In fact, every day foreign intelligence services tried to hack into US government websites and computer networks.

  “I don’t think our power grids are all that vulnerable,” she said. “I think that’s been overplayed. But, again, I’m not able to comment on your specific question.”

  Jamie cleared his throat loudly and Catherine Blaine turned toward the plane, as if noticing it for the first time. It was beginning to drizzle again, chilling the air.

  “So are you saying then that you have no knowledge of these breaches?”

  Blaine smiled, feeling a momentary exasperation at this leading question. A brief biography flashed up—Melanie Cross: business and tech reporter, who had helped break a story about illegal pharmaceutical networks in Africa; her boyfriend was, or had been, Jon Mallory, investigative reporter for the Weekly American magazine.

  “My immediate concern today,” she said, “is the flooding here and these good people of West Virginia who are suffering.”

  “Mmm hmm.” Melanie Cross pretended to scribble something in her notepad. Jamie widened his eyes.

  “Walk wit
h me to the plane, if you’d like,” Blaine said.

  “Okay.”

  They moved toward the Gulfstream, the reporter walking sideways, half a step ahead.

  “Off the record? I am aware that there have been some breaches in the past couple of weeks,” she said. “But if there is a comment, it would need to come out of the White House. As you know, our cyber command operation is based at Fort Meade and we now have a cyber security coordinator at the White House. A so-called cyber czar.”

  “Yes. And how do you feel about that?”

  “About what?”

  “Cyber command. Appointing a cyber czar.”

  “Oh.” Clever reporter. “Well, that’s another story, isn’t it?”

  Melanie Cross stopped walking and tilted her head, pen poised again. For years, there had been a philosophical tug of war between Homeland Security and the military over which should take the lead on cyber security issues. During her tenure in Congress, Blaine had spoken out against what she considered wasteful duplications of efforts.

  When she said nothing else, Melanie Cross prompted, “Off the record?”

  “Off the record, I think cyber security is still a poorly defined frontier, spread out across all of our intelligence branches. I think we’re doing better than we were but we’re still more vulnerable than we should be. Okay?”

  The reporter was writing furiously.

  “You said off the record.”

  “It is.”

  “Then why are you writing it down?”

  She lifted her pen. The marks on the page seemed gibberish to Catherine Blaine. Some kind of shorthand.

  “I know you pushed for more centralized efforts when you were in Congress,” she said, raising her chin. “And that you’ve talked about so-called unanticipated threats.”

  Blaine smiled, surprised that the reporter knew this. She had written an article for Foreign Affairs magazine three years earlier—a freewheeling, somewhat controversial essay about the need to anticipate “unexpected threats.” She had been a government foreign policy professor then, never imagining she’d be out on the front lines again like this. “Well, yes. I think it’s important to look for things that we haven’t imagined before,” she said. “There are many potential threats that we haven’t adequately considered simply because nothing like them has ever occurred before. That’s what happened on 9/11. We hadn’t seriously imagined that possibility. We didn’t think about putting sky marshals on airplanes.”