Off the Grid (15 page)

Ten minutes later, Nate heard Saeed’s and Ibby’s angry voices increase in volume as they neared the third shed from outside. He couldn’t understand a word they were saying because they were speaking Arabic.

The door flew open and Ibby strode inside. His face was flushed red and his eyes sparkled with emotion. He looked embarrassed. Saeed came in after him and closed the door behind them. The room suddenly seemed much smaller.

“I’m so sorry this happened,” Ibby said to Nate. “Are you hurt in any way?”

“No.”

“Good, good. Is it true that your camp was attacked by someone last night?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea who it was?”

Nate nodded toward Saeed. “Ask him.”

Ibby stared at Saeed, who held his glare. In Arabic, Ibby fired off
a flurry of angry questions. Saeed continued to shake his head no. Saeed’s face was impenetrable, Nate thought. He couldn’t tell if the man was lying.

Then, calmly, Saeed explained himself. Ibby listened with his hands on his hips and his head bowed. Saeed’s voice rose until the last sentence was almost shouted.

Ibby appeared to be contemplating what he’d heard, then he said to Nate, “Saeed says he doesn’t know for sure who came after you, but he has an idea who it could have been. Unfortunately, we can’t always control everyone who comes here to help with our project. What did these men look like?”

Nate described Heartless and Hipster, and as he did, Ibby and Saeed looked at each other in a way that indicated they were thinking the same thing.

“They were here,” Ibby said. “Sometimes losers show up and we have to send them away. The two you describe were sent away two days ago. We don’t know who the third man could have been. Are you sure you tracked him to here?”

Nate nodded.

“Then we’ve got a big problem,” Ibby said. “A number of new volunteers showed up last night and your man might have been one of them, or mixed up with them. It’ll be difficult to figure out who it was.”

He turned to Saeed and said, “You should start questioning everybody. Don’t tell them what we know, but try and figure out if a lone man arrived last night when those others did. And ask the team, too. Find out if someone went missing last night and showed up later. He—or she—could have recruited those two losers and driven them to his camp.”

Saeed nodded once. But he didn’t move.

“I’d suggest you start now,” Ibby said.

“No. Not until we are sure this is a safe situation,” Saeed said, nodding toward Nate.

Ibby said to Nate, “I’m sorry, but Saeed looks out for me even when I don’t want him to. He protects me and this camp, and he protects our work here. He’s like my own private Secret Service agent: a pain in the ass ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, but worth his weight in diamonds if I’m threatened or our project is threatened. It’s the same with his men here,” he said, gesturing to the two guards with the AK-47s. “They were surprised when you showed up on foot today and they assumed you came here with some other purpose in mind. So please tell me it was a misunderstanding.”

Nate said, “It was a misunderstanding.”

“You’re not working for someone who sent you here? I have to ask.”

“I’m on no one’s payroll,” Nate said. It was true enough.

Ibby assessed him for a half minute, then said, “I believe you. Remember that I told you that your reputation precedes you. We have two things in common—falconry and contempt for the overreach of the U.S. government.”

Little alarm bells rang deep inside Nate’s chest. Tyrell and Volk hadn’t characterized Muhammad Ibraaheem as one who had open contempt for the government. Nate wondered if they, or the other Wolverines, expected as much. He guessed that they probably did but had no proof. He recalled Tyrell and Volk saying Ibby’s reporting wasn’t strident in any kind of advocacy.

Ibby said, “Saeed said you have your famous big gun, but no communication devices. Does anyone know you’re here?”

Nate said, “You mean on this old ranch? No. I don’t even know for sure where I am. I was surprised to find all of these old buildings so far out here in the Red Desert.”

Ibby chuckled. “Me too. I came upon them when I was hunting. This was a sheep ranch at one time, but no one has lived here in decades.”

“So you don’t own it?”

Ibby shook his head. “We’re just borrowing it for a while.”

“What is this project you mentioned? The one that needs to be protected by Saeed and his thugs?”

Ibby paused for a moment and looked at his shoes. When he raised his head, his face was utterly sincere. He said, “We’re doing something good here.”

Then to Saeed: “Please unlock his handcuffs.”

“It’s a zip tie,” Saeed said.

“Then cut him loose and go start questioning the team and the volunteers after you’ve retrieved Nate’s falcons. Drive his Jeep back here. In the meantime, Nate and I have a lot to talk about.”

Saeed’s face betrayed him and he said, “You’re going to tell him everything?”

“Not just that,” Ibby said, “I’m going to show him. Nate is one of us. When he sees what we’re doing here, I’m confident he’ll join us. Believe me when I tell you we can use someone like him.”

Saeed was obviously skeptical. He again spoke in Arabic to Ibby in flat, declarative sentences that had just a note of pleading in them.

Ibby answered in a tone that was soft and low and ended in English: “Nate Romanowski has been the scourge of the powerful
elites for some time now. He is my brother in falconry and I know I can trust him.”

Nate didn’t know what to think about that, but it was obvious Saeed didn’t like it at all. Nate wished he hadn’t started to like Ibby.

Reluctantly, Saeed unsheathed a stubby fixed-blade knife and stepped over to Nate.

“Turn around,” he said.

“No need,” Nate said while unclenching his fists and pressing the palms of his hands together so the zip tie slid off. He handed the plastic loop to Saeed, whose eyes flashed with both anger and surprise.

“How did you do that?” Saeed asked.

“I was trained to be a Peregrine. We don’t willingly let ourselves be caught.”

Nate turned to the man with the stun gun. “And for my next trick, I rip the ears off Ahmed over there.”

The man’s eyes got big and he sat up straight with the AK-47 pointed at Nate.

Ibby nodded approvingly. He said to Saeed: “This is why I want him on our team.”

•   •   •

W
HEN
S
AEED
and his two men were gone, Ibby said, “We’ll find out who is responsible for attacking your camp. Saeed can be very persuasive.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“So, I bet you have a million questions.”

“I do.”

“Go ahead.”

“What do you mean when you say you’re doing something good here?”

They were seated in the chairs in the small room and Ibby scooted his over until their knees were nearly touching. He placed his hands on his thighs and leaned forward.

“I used to be a journalist,” Ibby said. “In my job I traveled all over the world, but I spent a good deal of time in the Middle East. I saw what was happening over there firsthand, and I spoke constantly with American military and intelligence officials. I learned what this government, and specifically the National Security Agency, was capable of. At first I thought, ‘Okay, every government has to spy on other regimes.’ Then I learned more and I started to get very, very alarmed. It’s one thing to spy to keep your people safe. I would expect that—anyone would expect that. But it’s another thing to build an apparatus that can spy on each and every citizen in the country.”

Nate nodded for him to go on.

“What if I were to tell you that there is a government facility that is storing every electronic communication made by every American citizen? I’m talking phone calls, emails, texts, social media posts—
everything
—all in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution?”

Ibby closed his eyes and recited: “‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched,
and the persons or things to be seized.’ That’s verbatim because I’ve memorized it.

“What would you say?” he asked.

“I’d say that is a problem.”

“It’s not hypothetical,” Ibby said. “It’s not something they might do or they could do. It’s something they’re doing
right now
. When I heard about it from a disillusioned NSA agent, I couldn’t believe it at first, and I’m not a technical wizard, so it took a while to wrap my mind around it.

“Here’s how it works: Metadata—meaning phone calls, phone numbers, emails, texts, satellite spying data,
everything
—that is generated by or intercepted by the NSA has to go somewhere. It’s a gigantic river of information that comes from multiple places: satellites that are routed through the Aerospace Data Facility at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado; NSA facilities at Fort Gordon, Georgia; NSA Texas in San Antonio; NSA Hawaii in Oahu; plus domestic and overseas ‘listening posts,’ as they call them. All of that data now goes to
one place
”—he emphasized the words by thrusting a single finger in the air—“one place with the server capacity to store and analyze it all. Think of it as the NSA’s own personal taxpayer-funded cloud.

“So, after it gets to that
one place
, the data is analyzed by supersophisticated supercomputers that have computing power beyond our imagination. They can do billions of algorithms per second. The results are funneled to the Multiprogam Research Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland; and eventually to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House.”

“I’d say it’s a big operation,” Nate said. “But isn’t the purpose to identify bad guys?”

Ibby laughed. “That was the original premise. That by gathering all this information, the people in charge could figure out who the bad guys were and who they were talking to or communicating with. But it’s gone beyond that and we both know it. It’s gotten so out of hand it’s unrecognizable. That’s why you and I have chosen to stay off the grid, isn’t it?”

Nate nodded. He recalled how Tyrell and Volk had located him only when Liv placed two calls to her dying mother in Louisiana.

“I come from a totalitarian country,” Ibby said. “The people are controlled because the government spies on them and denies them human rights. The government keeps the lid on domestic uprisings by thwarting them before they get started. They do this by spying on people. I grew up a beneficiary of that system but it took me a long time to realize what it was. That’s not supposed to happen here, is it? Spying on three hundred and fifty million people sounds impossible. But that capability now exists.”

Nate said, “I thought they shut down the program last year.”

Ibby paused and stared at Nate as if he had grown a second nose. He said, “Do you
really
think they’d spend four billion dollars on the facility and stop using it just because Congress told them to? They’ve lied about it before. Do you
really
trust your government to pull back on data-gathering? When was the last time you heard of a government program that got smaller?”

“I see your point,” Nate conceded.

“I thought you would.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“You mean
we
, don’t you?”

Nate suppressed a smile.

“We’re designing something right here, under the roofs of these
sheds and in plain view of satellite imagery, that will restore the Fourth Amendment to all Americans.”

Ibby grinned. His passion for the subject was evident. Even bordering on obsessive, Nate thought.

“We’re building something that will fuck up all the data within that facility.”

“You’re building it here?” Nate asked, incredulous.

“Yes.”

“Please tell me it’s not a bomb.”

“Of course not,” Ibby said, taken aback. “Our target is illegal data: ones and zeros, lots of them. Trillions of them. But not people. Absolutely not.”

“So how are you going to do this?”

“You’ll understand when I show you our team and our facilities.”

“I’ve seen them,” Nate said. “This place is a dump.”

Ibby laughed again. “That’s what we want them to see.”

Then he turned serious. “Early on, a couple of years ago, some chatter got out about what we wanted to do. That was before I found this place and imposed standards and practices here: absolutely no Internet access, no cell phones, not even hardwired phones. I knew we had to be completely self-sufficient . . . primitive, even. I communicate with other people with handwritten messages and by courier only, and I make sure I trust the courier with my life—which I literally do.”

He leaned forward again. “We are right under their noses, but they don’t know it.”

“What do you mean?”

Ibby paused. “You know the
one place
I mentioned earlier? The
one place
where all the data goes to be stored and analyzed?”

“Yes?”

“It’s two hundred and seventy-seven miles from here on I-80, outside a little town called Bluffdale, Utah. Population about ten thousand people. It’s called the Utah Data Center but it’s owned by the NSA.”

“You’re kidding,” Nate said.

“I wish I was,” Ibby said. “It’s over a million square feet and cost more than four billion dollars to build. They finished it a couple of years ago. We’re talking four twenty-five-thousand-square-foot facilities filled with rows and rows of servers and over nine hundred thousand square feet of technical support. It’s got its own power substation to generate sixty-five-megawatt demand—that’s about forty million dollars a year in electricity alone. And the security is mind-blowing. Cameras everywhere, and a fence that’ll stop a fifteen-thousand-pound vehicle going fifty miles an hour.”

“How are you going to get in?” Nate asked.

Ibby smiled. “That’s the thing. We don’t have to.”