Invasion of Privacy (14 page)

After Mom and Jess left, Grace looked up sloths on Wikipedia. She was fascinated to learn that they slept twenty-three hours a day and that it took them an hour to walk one hundred yards. They really were as slow as everyone said. She decided that she loved sloths, even if her mom had said that there was no way on God’s green earth they were ever getting one.

Grace closed the laptop and sat up. The sudden movement made her wince. Her leg felt as if it were glued to her hip. It didn’t want to move. She looked toward the door to make sure it was closed and no one was watching, then she stood up. It took her a while, and it hurt a lot. She was glad no one could see.

She went into the bathroom and pulled up her nightgown. She prodded her thigh and gasped. Bruises didn’t usually hurt so badly. Maybe it was the other thing. The thought frightened her so much she wanted to cry. She bit on her finger to stop. It wouldn’t be fair to Mommy to tell her. Not now, with Daddy gone. Mommy had enough problems.

Grace limped back to her bed. She spent a minute talking to her father, asking if he was all right. He didn’t answer. She thought that was because he wasn’t in heaven yet. She didn’t really believe in heaven. At least, not like in the Bible. She believed in something else. Something just as good. It was warm and welcoming and somewhere up in the night sky. She knew her dad was there and he’d talk to her when he could.

Grace needed to ask him about the bruise. The doctor said she was all better, but Grace had read lots about the disease that had tried to kill her. She knew that not all girls got cured. Someone had to be one of the two out of ten who didn’t make it.

She took another look at the bruise. She told herself it was from the trampoline. It wasn’t cancer. God wouldn’t do that to their family. Not after taking Dad.

She decided not to tell Mommy about her leg. She didn’t think she could take it right now.

“Mine.”

Fort George C. Meade sat on five thousand acres of rolling Maryland countryside twenty-six miles northeast of Washington, D.C. First opened in 1917, it was chosen as the home of the National Security Agency in the 1950s because of its proximity to the nation’s capital. With the Cold War at its peak and the Cuban missile crisis fresh in American minds, Fort Meade was deemed close enough to Washington for easy commuting and far enough away to survive a nuclear attack. Now Fort Meade was home to more than forty thousand employees, many of whom held a top-secret security clearance.

The fort had its own post office, fire department, and police force. Electrified fences ran the length of the installation’s perimeter. Security cameras and motion detectors covered every square foot. To block any electromagnetic signals from escaping, protective copper shielding wrapped every one of the more than 1,300 buildings inside the compound.

Waiting at the checkpoint as his identification was examined, Ian Prince looked through the rows of fences at the rectangular black glass office building a half mile away that housed the headquarters of the nation’s most secretive intelligence organization.

“Mine,” he repeated to himself.

It was the NSA’s mandate to collect and analyze all signals communication and data relating to foreign intelligence, by overt and clandestine means. Thirty years ago that meant intercepting suspicious radio, telephone, and satellite traffic. Today it meant all that plus policing the Internet, not just monitoring all forms of online traffic for clues to evil intent but protecting all United States government communications and information systems from foreign interference and disruption. On this sunny, humid day, Ian and his colleagues had come to offer ONE’s assistance with both objectives.

“Here you are, sir,” said the guard, returning Ian’s ID and those of his passengers, Peter Briggs and Dev Patel. “Welcome to Fort Meade.”

Ian noticed the guard’s quizzical gaze. “Anything wrong?”

It was not his first trip to Fort Meade, or his second, or even his tenth. Since October 2001 he’d been secretly visiting three or four times a year. Each time he got the same dumbfounded look.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be driving,” said the guard. “I thought you’d have a chauffeur.”

“I always drive,” said Ian, giving a salute.

“Yessir. Have a good day.”

The gate rose. Simultaneously the steel Delta barrier sank into the ground. Ian headed down a long winding lane toward the black building, officially known as OPS2A. He remembered the feeling of awe he’d experienced on his first visits, the visceral thrill of being so close to the most powerful data-collection apparatus in the world. It was then that the idea had first come to him.

Over time his awe had tempered as he and ONE became the NSA’s partner, albeit a silent and secret one. Today, as he closed in on his dream, as the changing of the guard grew near, he felt only pride. A father’s pride. One day soon this would all be his.

The Emperor was waiting inside the conference room when Ian arrived.

“Good to see you, Ian,” said General Terry Wolfe of the United States Air Force, director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. He was known throughout the intelligence community as the Emperor. “Has it been six months?”

“Seven,” said Ian. “December, I believe.”

Wolfe greeted Patel warmly, addressing him as Dr. Patel. Briggs waited outside.

“Time flies,” said Wolfe, leading them to the table. “Must have been before all that Merriweather nonsense.”

“It was,” said Ian. “That’s all behind us, I take it.”

The “nonsense” was the lengthy investigation conducted by the FBI into allegations of bribery and extortion surrounding ONE’s acquisition of Merriweather Systems. The same allegations Gordon May had made two days before on the airstrip in Reno, though there had never been any mention of complicity in the plane crash that took John Merriweather’s life.

It was in response to these charges that Ian had deemed it necessary
to hack into the FBI’s central computer system. He’d been able to gather enough information to put a stop to the FBI’s queries. But the price had been high. His work had not gone unnoticed by the Bureau’s Cyber Investigations Division and Special Agent Joseph Grant.

“The FBI says it is. Who am I to argue?” Wolfe took his place at the head of the conference table and motioned for Ian to sit at his right.

The director of the NSA was of medium height and medium build, with thinning hair, a puffy, pleasant face, and timid blue eyes that blinked often behind rimless eyeglasses. Not so much an emperor as a middle-aged father who’d been up late the night before helping a child with his homework. In his tenure at the helm of the NSA, he had turned a once sleepy, unheralded intelligence agency into the nation’s most vaunted fighter of terrorism. When General Terry Wolfe wanted something, both Congress and the military came running, checkbooks at the ready.

Ian opened the bottle of mineral water placed before him, waiting for any mention of Semaphore. The word was not spoken.

With Wolfe was Bob Goldfarb, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the nation’s foremost computer research hub. Goldfarb was old and gnomish, with as much hair sprouting from his ears as on top of his mottled head.

“Hello, Bob,” said Ian. “Long time.”

“Exaflops,” whispered Goldfarb. “Can it be?”

Ian answered with a cryptic smile. All good things to those who wait.

“Shall we get down to brass tacks?” said Wolfe. “Are we to understand that you’ve solved the heating problem?”

“That’s correct,” said Ian.

“And none too soon,” said Goldfarb. “Cutting it close, are we?”

“We can’t risk another incident,” said Wolfe diplomatically. “Bluffdale is our number-one priority these days. We have a lot invested in the demonstration.”

Bluffdale, Utah, was home to the Utah Data Center, soon to be the world’s largest intelligence collection and storage site, where six months earlier the NSA had installed two hundred Titan supercomputers. It was billed as “a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to enable and protect national cybersecurity.” In reality the Utah Data Center was a vacuum cleaner designed to suck up as much of the world’s communications
traffic as technologically possible. It collected traffic from undersea cables and underground fiber-optic cables, from satellites high in the sky and dishes on firm ground. Its servers were so large that they measured contents not in gigabytes or terabytes or even petabytes. They measured their take in yottabytes, where one yottabyte equaled 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

It was the Utah Data Center’s primary mission to gather and store all communications traffic generated by the entire world for the next ten years.

“And ours, too,” said Ian. “But that was six months ago, immediately after we took over the project from John Merriweather. As you’ll see, we’ve made some improvements.”

“Frankly, the boys at Oak Ridge are skeptical,” said Goldfarb. “A few of us are more than that.”

“Until yesterday I was doubtful, too. I can promise you that the specs are accurate.”

“Exaflops,” said Goldfarb. “Really?”

Patel chimed in. “It was our team’s primary consideration when we took over management of the project. Speed’s the primary factor when executing algorithmic strategies.”

The strategies Patel referred to involved decrypting encoded messages, or, in the vernacular, “breaking a code.” There was only one reason the NSA wanted the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It was during an initial test that Titan had overheated. A second demonstration was scheduled for the following morning, with many high-ranking government officials set to attend, including the vice president. It would be Titan’s second and final chance.

“I’m sure we’ll be able to judge for ourselves,” said General Wolfe, playing the peacemaker. “So? The test?”

Ian nodded at Patel, who distributed a set of bound notebooks to the NSA men. No one spoke as the government officials studied the detailed results of the prior day’s test. The men finished reading. Their eyes met each other’s, then Ian’s. Ian imagined that Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers must have looked much the same way after Robert Oppenheimer informed them of the successful test of the atomic bomb in May 1945.

“Exaflops,” said Goldfarb.

“Exaflops,” said Ian.

“Exaflops,” said General Wolfe, taking ownership of the word.

“Two hundred degrees Fahrenheit,” said Goldfarb. “Sounds low.”

“Two hundred six, actually,” said Ian. “Then the cooling system kicked in.”

“At which point Titan’s internal temperature decreased to one hundred eighty degrees,” added Patel.

“How?” said Wolfe. “It’s a gosh-darned miracle.”

“Just a little tinkering,” said Ian. “An extra fan here and there.”

“Whatever you did,” said Wolfe, “we want Titan on-site at Fort Meade.”

“I believe that’s another contract,” said Ian.

“Soon you’ll have a monopoly,” said Wolfe. “There won’t be a network in D.C. that doesn’t come from ONE.”

“Maybe one day,” said Ian.

Bob Goldfarb’s skepticism had vanished. His dark eyes sparkled greedily as he placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “How soon can we install it?”

“Dev can work with your people to install the software patch today. If all goes as it should, we can keep to our plan for the demonstration tomorrow morning.”

“That’s cutting it close,” said Wolfe. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

“Tomorrow morning it is.” Wolfe moved to a table at the end of the conference room and poured glasses of sparkling apple cider. Beltway bubbly, he called it as he offered round the glasses.

“To Titan,” said Wolfe.

“To Titan,” the others chimed in.

Ian touched glasses with each man in turn and drank his cider.

Afterward Peter Briggs took Ian aside and offered a handshake. “The king is dead,” he whispered. “Long live the king.”

“You mean the Emperor,” said Ian.

Mary called Randy Bell at eight on the dot. He answered on the first ring, sounding chipper and alert. So much for her plan of catching him hungover and with his defenses down. Her career as an investigator was not off to a promising start.

“Randy,” she said. “It’s Mary Grant.”

“Gee, Mary, I’m so sorry about Joe. Did you get my message?” Bell had a high, youthful voice. He was in his midfifties, with hair white as snow, but on the phone he sounded like a twenty-year-old.

“E-mail? I haven’t had time to look through them all, but thanks all the same. Sorry if I woke you.”

“It’s nine o’clock,” said Bell. “I’ve been up two hours.”

“In Sacramento?”

“I’m in D.C.” Bell paused, then added, “Just visiting the old crew. Gosh, Mary, I don’t know what to say. I’m crushed. I can’t believe what happened. None of us can. How you holding up?”

She told him that she was fine and that the kids were going to make it through. She took a breath, suddenly nervous, not sure how to begin. “Randy, I know you and Joe were buddies,” she said. “When was the last time you talked?”

“June. Right after the playoffs.”

“How’d he sound?”

“Like Joe. A little crazy ’cause the Celtics lost. But he sounded good.”

“And work? You guys talk shop?”

“I’m retired six months now,” said Bell. “I’m out of the loop.”

“Still, Joe thought a lot of you.”

“He was a good kid.”

That’s twice he’s avoided the question, thought Mary. She walked into Joe’s office. The yellow legal pad was on the desk where she’d left it. She stared at her husband’s writing, at the funny little flags all over the page, wondering how she was supposed to lead Randy Bell subtly to the question of Joe’s trips to San Jose.

“What was that case you two were working—the one he was always going on about, about the Asian syndicate pirating those jet designs?”

“Pricks were hacking into Boeing’s mainframe, downloading designs for the new wing it’s building, and selling them to China.”

“And the other case,” she went on. “You know, the one where you guys were always flying down to San Jose. I forget who Joe said you were seeing.”

Randy Bell didn’t answer.

“Randy…you there?”

“Why are you asking about this?”

“Just trying to tie up some loose ends.”

“What kind of loose ends?”

The cat was officially out of the bag. Mary gave up all effort at pretense. She was no investigator. She was just a wife who wanted to know the true circumstances surrounding her husband’s murder. “Sixteen trips. That’s how many times Joe went to San Jose without telling me. You guys were partners for at least eight of those. He kept flying out there even after we moved. I’m guessing that’s why we came to Austin, so he could continue to work that case, only from out here. I’m guessing that’s what got him killed.”

“I can’t talk about this, Mary.”

“There’s something fishy about the explanation of Joe’s death. It isn’t right.”

“Did you hear me? I can’t discuss this.”

“Come on, Randy. We’re talking about Joe. You were like an older brother. Can you see him getting into a car with an armed informant? Can you?”

“Mary, please—”

“They’re painting it like it was his fault. But it wasn’t. Joe knew he was in trouble. He was scared. A scared man doesn’t get into a car with someone whom he believes might want to hurt him.”

“Mary, stop. How do you know he was scared?”

“He called me before he was killed. I didn’t speak with him, but he left me a message. He knew something was wrong. He told me to find someone named Sid. Do you know who that is?”

“No. Can’t say I do.”

“What about a Judge Angelo Caruso? Travis County Superior Court?”

“Where are you getting this stuff? Last I looked, Joe’s casework was confidential.”

Mary shook her head, staring at the notepad, running a pen over the silly blue flags. One more stonewall. She wondered if Don Bennett had gotten to Randy, too. “Sure you don’t know someone named Sid?” she asked again. “Joe said he was one of the good guys.”

“Please, Mary. Stop asking these questions.”

Mary stared at the little flags that Joe had drawn all over the page. It dawned on her what they were. Of course. It was obvious.

“Semaphore,” she blurted.

“What did you say?”

“Semaphore. Why?”

“Shut up, Mary.”

“Excuse me? Did you tell me to shut up? Randy…are you there?”

“I’m here. Whatever you do, don’t say that word again.”

“What word?”

“Never. Do you hear me? Goodbye now.”

“Randy?” she said, but the connection had ended.

She called back and the phone went to message. “Randy. What did you mean about not saying that word? What word?
Semaphore
?”