Safe by Martha Baer

Author:Martha Baer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

EIGHT

Common Sensors

IN A HOTEL ROOM seven blocks from the White House, Jay Boris sits at a laptop and wreaks havoc on downtown Washington. At his command, a deadly gas is released in a corner of Lafayette Park. An invisible cloud spreads quickly among and above the trees of the one-block park and sets off down Pennsylvania Avenue. Surprisingly, its tendrils avoid the White House itself, only 100 yards or so away, but quickly start to fill up the spaces between the termite mounds of bureaucracy in the Federal Triangle area. As it moves forward, the cloud of death unfurls like an ink drop in a slow stream of water, swirling and perverse: it turns back on itself; it rushes forward; it laps up against the facades of some buildings with a powerful illusion of purpose; it leaves others almost unscathed, protected by a simple whim of the wind.

Outside the hotel room’s windows, of course, there’s no such poison cloud. Just a normal Washington morning. The attack exists only within Boris’s laptop and is visible only on the computer’s screen. The computer is running a program that produces models—unprecedented in their detail—of how the wind can spread toxic gases or radioactive particles or pathogens such as anthrax spores. At this sort of fidelity, such modeling normally requires hours, even days, on a supercomputer. Boris, a sharp, intriguing, and slightly arch physicist in his sixties, is a chief scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington who has spent decades on supercomputer simulations, and the program on his PC is an ingenious new way of making the results of such modeling available through a simple system that works on a laptop. Boris hopes it’s going to be picked up as a new tool for dealing with one of the most intractable and unsettling aspects of the threat of terrorism—invisibility.

The attack on Boris’s computer screen is only a scenario. The problem is that even if this horrendous event were playing out for real and a plume of anthrax was spreading past the White House, the scene outside the hotel room’s windows could well look precisely the same. A normal Washington morning. Nothing to be seen until people start dying.

Among the ominous qualities that make the “war on terror” different from other wars is the invisibility of the terrorist enemy and his weapons. In this conflict, there are hidden leaders, disguised combatants, and undetectable intentions; and there are weapons you cannot see: radiation, gases, and, most terrible of all, germs. A threat that can be seen may also be unstoppable—ICBMs remain so to this day, despite tens of billions of dollars spent on Star Wars and its successors—but at least it is defined. If you can muster the fortitude, you can face it, seek out its weaknesses, look it in the eye and formulate a strategy to minimize its effects. A threat that cannot be seen is something else entirely. It’s not just that invisibility gives a tactical advantage by denying a defender information.

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