Free Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) by James W. Hall

cops and judges and abortion doctors, just waiting their chance to bring the federal government crashing down.
    No, ecowarriors were number one.
    Pure silliness, as far as Sheffield was concerned. Sure, their dollar totals were up in the 40 million range, mostly from burning down those posh resorts in Aspen and trashing cosmetics-testing plants, but they’d never killed anyone and seemed to be trying their best to keep it that way. They were a bunch of idealistic merry pranksters. A ragtag assortment of dope smokers with a badass green streak. Most of the few hundred criminal acts attributed to them were so minor league, it was a stretch to call them criminal at all. He kept it to himself, but Frank could even work up a mild sympathy for their cause. He wasn’t a big fan of urban sprawl.
    “Apparently,” McIvey said, “whoever hacked the plant’s system wasn’t trying to crash the reactors or cause a meltdown or anything catastrophic. Besides leaving this screen saver behind, looks like their mission was exploratory, testing the plant’s cyber defenses. A probe of some kind, digital snooping. Possibly to identify vulnerabilities, what they call ‘susceptible nodes.’ Like this might be stage one, a warm-up for the main event. Or it could be just a one-shot deal. Thumbing their nose. A head fake. Pretending interest in Turkey Point, but planning to strike somewhere else.”
    She blew through the tollbooth’s SunPass lane.
    “You’re running a covert operation in my backyard. Withholding information about a security breach at the largest nuclear facility in Florida. In case you didn’t know, our South Florida Field Office has a cybersecurity task force, a WMD task force, we cover all those bases. Our guys are the best.”
    “You want the truth, my opinion, it’s politics. People above me kept everyone in the dark so NIPC can score a takedown. Justify our existence.”
    National Infrastructure Protection Center, that was her agency. Frank had watched it all mushroom since the Twin Towers were hit, an explosion of federal programs under the aegis of Homeland Security. NIPC identified and analyzed threats and vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. Electrical grids, bridges, roads, water systems, highways, railways, navigable waterways, airports, the Internet and phone systems. Anything that moved people or power or goods and services or information. The grid police.
    Huge mandate that overlapped with about five other existing agencies, including work the FBI had been doing for most of Frank’s career. All that growth was supposed to improve interagency communication, but what it did was make the turf wars even more bitter than pre-9/11. Another reason he’d decided to pull the rip cord, float back to a life of full-time Hawaiian shirts.
    “So here’s the deal, Frank. The computer network at Turkey Point is a closed loop. Critical areas are wired internally, but not exposed to the Internet. So a cyber attack has to be launched inside the plant using one of the on-site computers. Insert a flash drive or download malicious code. It has to come from inside the loop. But then you probably know all this.”
    “Refresher course is fine. I like listening to you talk.”
    She gave him a quick don’t go there look and got back to driving.
    Sheffield debated it. Confess now, lay his cards faceup, or keep holding out. For her part, Nicole had been concealing several major investigations, which gave Sheffield the moral high ground. If he was going to drop his own bomb, this was the moment.
    But McIvey floored the Taurus and blasted by another slow mover, rocking Sheffield back in his seat, and the moment passed.

 
    NINE
    “SO, AFTER THE BREACH,” MCIVEY said, “Homeland was all over it. Their techies traced the entry to a workstation in the biology lab where the croc research is based. Appears somebody spent a few hours on that computer, planting the ELF logo, poking around. This desk sits idle most of the day while