The Outer Circle (The Counterpoint Trilogy Book 3) (9 page)

Los Angeles, USA

Maggie was sitting in the living room with headphones on and eyes closed, quietly swaying to music. Another dream of driving last night. She was in a car with the top down driving on a mountain road at night, trees on one side, a sharp drop on the other. A powerful engine purrs. Suddenly, her headlights start growing dimmer. Soon, she can see only a few feet ahead. The car won’t slow down. She has to pull over, but there is no shoulder as the road is heading downhill. She can’t see where the next turn is, cringes in anticipation, hits the steering wheel – and suddenly the headlights are back on and she sees the road twisting just in time as she manages the car through the next turn.

She did not hear Alejandro coming in, watching her. Finally, he gently touched her arm and she came about.

“Alejandro!”

“Maggie.” Low, silky voice. “What are you listening to?”

“It’s an old Russian and Georgian poet. Bulat Okudzhava.”

“Can I listen?”

Maggie switched her phone from Bluetooth to a speaker and sounds of a guitar with a halting man’s voice filled the room.

“What is he saying?”

“Let me see, I’ll try to translate.”

Maggie switched to the beginning of the song and slowly spelled it out in English:

In times of pain and bloodshed,

When showers of steel

Pummel us

Without mercy

And the leaders can’t be heard,

People listen

To the little orchestra of hope

Being conducted by love.

“Is that what you are thinking, Maggie?”

“Yes, Alejandro. Little orchestra of Hope with Love as a conductor.”

“What do you hope for?”

“I hope for peace, Alejandro. I hope for a normal life. I hope for a baby. I hope to stop running.”

“Is that why you are here?”

“Yes, Alejandro. I am tired. We came back in order to resolve this, to put an end to running.”

Alejandro got up, took Maggie’s hand, kissed it.

“I will protect you. I can give you peace. I can give you everything you want.”

After he left, she sat there looking out the darkened windows.
I will protect you
. By “you,” he meant her, Maggie. Not Maggie and David. She turned the music back on.

It’s painful to pay for our mistakes,

I hope to be able to smile through the torment.

Laguna Beach, USA

The former carpool lane was given to driverless cars. Jennifer was watching in wonderment the procession of cars with telltale humps on the roof. In theory, these cars were supposed to whizz by at high speed with only 10-15 feet separating cars. In practice, having to get out of the fast lane into regular traffic slowed things down considerably. She did not feel quite ready to hand over driving to the machine. Besides, they did not have the money for a new car anyway. Jeff had to stop working two years ago when politics – ‘the movement’ as he called it – began taking all of his time. She also had to quit last December, as Jeff needed her help. She was the one person he trusted the most. Jeff agreed to take a token salary as the head of the Reform party, but they primarily lived off their savings. At least their election-related travel expenses were being paid for.

Tomorrow, they were going to leave for the East Coast, to have some meetings and to give an interview to a TV network. And visit her father’s grave, as they did every year. Today, she was driving to see their daughter Nana. They named her Nastya after Jennifer’s grandmother on the father’s side, but as Nastya was learning to talk she kept referring to herself as Nana and it stuck. It’d been six months since they sent Nana to live with Jennifer’s mom and grandfather. Jennifer kept reminding herself that this was done for Nana’s safety, but she could not shake off the feeling of guilt toward her daughter.

Jennifer steered their old car into a parking space in front of Sam Baker’s house on Ocean Way. As she walked into the house, a man blocked her way. He looked at her suspiciously, then with a glimpse of recognition stepped to the side and motioned for her to go in. Nana ran out:
“Mom!”

Mother and daughter embraced and rocked quietly for a minute, squeezing each other hard, reconnecting. Then Nana untangled herself:

“I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,” Jennifer choked out.
I want my life back, the life without threats, without having to send my daughter away!

“Grandma is on the patio.”

“Who’s that man at the door?”

“Oh, we have three security guards now. Everybody in the neighborhood has guards.”

Nana lead Jennifer into the house and they made their way to the familiar huge patio overlooking Woods Cove.

Karen Baker was there with Caroline, a local woman she befriended after Karen moved here three years ago. Caroline was in her early 50s but she neither looked nor acted her age: a big smile, a mop of soft blond hair, a surfboard in a puddle of water in the corner, a whiff of weed in the air.

Jennifer went over and gave her mother a brief peck on the cheek:

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, baby!” answered Karen without getting up.

“Good to see you, Caroline!” smiled Jennifer.

“Hi, Jennifer! Wanna reefer?” Caroline giggled.

“No, thank you.”

“If you are worried about your husband’s political career, weed’s been legalized, you know,” Caroline enjoyed teasing Jennifer.

“No thank you anyway. How’s the dating life?”

“Oh, you know, men... Surfing is so much more fun. Although men are good for a couple of things. Replacing light bulbs is one.”

“And the other?”

“Oh, you know. Although I have tried one of these new virtual reality suits recently, so perhaps even that is no longer necessary,” laughed Caroline.

“Really? How was it?” Karen got interested.

“I’ll tell you after Nana here leaves.”

Poor Nana blushed, her face turning crimson.

“Don’t make fun of my granddaughter,” protested Karen, laughing. Then she turned to Jennifer:

“How are you holding up, honey?”

“OK, mom, OK. We are going to get the Secret Service protection in a few days. They assign it four months before the elections. I figured I’ll drive down here while I still can without supervision.”

“Life in politics must be hard.”

“Yes, it is!” a halting voice came up behind.

Jennifer turned and barely contained her gasp. Sam Baker aged noticeably, even just in the couple of months she had not seen him. A quick succession of his wife’s death and retirement from politics has left an imprint. A stocky, powerfully built man became frail, shuffling his feet and leaning on a cane.

Sam kissed his granddaughter and sat down:

“Who would have thought – me getting out of politics just as my granddaughter was getting into it. Pour me some of that ice tea, sweetheart.”

Nana poured him a glass and he noisily kissed her on the cheek as well.

“Yes, it’s not easy to be a wife of a politician. Your grandmother used to say that she is living in a glass bowl, with everyone looking in.”

“The attention has been difficult,” admitted Jennifer. “Fortunately, we live on a small dead-end street and the city agreed, with the neighbors’ permission, to block it for most traffic. But it’s been harder on Jeff than on me. He is a very private, shy person and all the attention and notoriety are not easy.”

“Your husband is the most apolitical politician I have ever met,” agreed Sam.

“He never wanted to get into politics. It’s just one thing led to another, and for all his shyness he is not the one to step away from a challenge. And the next challenge. He is stubborn,” smiled Jennifer proudly.

“Grandpa, why won’t you help my Dad?” asked Nana.

“Nana!” exclaimed Karen and Jennifer in unison. Poor girl recoiled.

“That’s OK, sweetheart, don’t let them shut you down. Asking tough questions is your constitutional right,” laughed Sam and patted Nana’s hand. “Why, indeed? You see, I walked out of politics two years ago and promised myself I’ll never get involved again.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been in Washington for almost forty years. I will admit that sometimes the power went to my head; there are some things I did that I am not proud of. But, for the most part, I tried to do what I thought was the right thing. Von Bismark once said that ‘Politics is the art of the possible,’ and that’s true. We were doing what was possible, hoping that the future will bail us out. We knew that piling on trillions and trillions of debt and obligations was wrong, but we’d been told this was the only way to save the country. And to get reelected. And that we just ‘owe it to ourselves,’ so it didn’t matter. We thought that we’d be able to control everything; we were wrong. I lost faith in knowing what the right thing is. That’s why I don’t want to get involved.”

The old man sat back in his chair and looked into the distance, over the ocean.

Everyone was quiet for a minute, and then Jennifer asked:

“Nana, do you need any help with the online math course?”

“Yes, mom, if you can take a look at the last two lessons. I really want to catch up before the next school year starts.”

Jennifer and Nana excused themselves and went into the house.

“Who does Nana look like?” asked Caroline. “She has some of Jennifer in her. Not much of Jeff, judging by the pictures.”

“She looks just like Pavel,” replied Karen. “Same eyes, same nose, same hair. His genes skipped a generation.”

“Your ex-husband?”

“My late husband,” corrected her Karen. “Pavel was killed before we got divorced.”

“The police concluded it was a suicide,” said Sam Baker.

“Dad, Pavel was killed. Let’s not even debate this!”

“Yes, of course,” conceded her father.

Karen turned to Caroline:

“You see, Jennifer still blames me and my dad for her father’s death. She thinks that if we did not split up, Pavel would not have gotten involved in whatever got him killed. She’s been cold to me ever since, for eighteen years.”

“Who killed him?”

“We don’t know. Just before his death, he made two trips to Russia, investigating some financial machinations. He also met with Jeff Kron, my son-in-law. Jeff was accused of murder at that time. He believes that Pavel was the one who set him free.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that story,” nodded Caroline. “And that changed Jeff’s life and Jennifer’s life, and now Jeff is running for President. Can you believe that?” Caroline turned to Sam.

“When you get to be eighty five, not much surprises you,” smiled Sam. “You change someone’s life and you just might change the world.”

“Sam, do you think Pavel helped to free Jeff?”

Sam sipped his ice tea, thought for a minute.

“Perhaps, but it does not matter. What matters is that Jeff is absolutely convinced of this. He told me once that he believes that his life was given back to him and thus is no longer just his. Jeff has lived for the past eighteen years to prove that he deserved that second chance at life. That’s why he does not shy away from challenges.”

“Dad, do you think he’ll win the election?” asked Karen.

“I don’t know. He is a most unusual politician. Jeff is more of a zealot with a mission, to right some of the wrongs that the powerful people of this world inflicted on the less fortunate ones. I would have been scared of him except that I know he does not believe in the end justifying the means. And I think that Jennifer provides a good, stabilizing influence on him. She does not scare some people off the way Jeff does. In a sense, she is a better politician,” smiled Sam.

“Amen to that, I would vote for her!” laughed Caroline.

Washington, DC, USA

By 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigations operated on a $12 billion annual budget. For that money, it had almost fifteen thousand field agents and four thousand analysts. But the largest group of the FBI workforce was professional staff, a significant portion of which was dedicated to building and managing the data gathering and analysis infrastructure. The central hub was the vast classified data center in Virginia, to which high-speed communications networks carried hundreds of petabytes of data daily, to be simply stored or sifted through by powerful supercomputers.

The FBI data infrastructure interconnected with a similar infrastructure of the National Security Agency (NSA), forming a redundant, highly reliable web that tracked video feeds, phone exchanges, e-mails, captured verbal conversations, and more. Anything that was not encrypted was analyzed in almost-real time against target words, expressions, and data sequences.

Encrypted data was forwarded to the ‘Alan’ section, named after Alan Turing. Alan’s computers decoded effortlessly most of the standard encryption schemes. Only a small percentage of the encrypted data that used specialized algorithms with very long, sometimes one-time codes, could not be broken easily. These messages were sent to a designated ‘brute force’ section of supercomputers that were churning through quadrillions of combinations daily trying to decipher the code. It was a constant battle between the ever-powerful data center and a few privacy-obsessed malcontents that stubbornly continued to come up with new algorithms and longer codes.

The data center had an electronic dossier on every adult American. Each dossier compiled many gigabytes of data including their addresses, education, work experiences, iris prints, encoded facial recognition profile, organizations they belonged to, tax records, history of internet searches and site visits, their virtual world encounters, captured video, audio, e-mail, and texting records, their purchases, their travel, instances of their license plates being caught by drones and ubiquitous cameras, and more. Even if the correlated data did not trigger any pre-programmed alarms, it was sitting there for later use and a more detailed analysis – if needed.

The FBI mined the data to prevent terrorist attacks. A great many attacks had been successfully prevented and lives saved. A significant number of people that had not planned any attacks had been harassed, intimidated, sometimes even convicted on unrelated charges because they have exhibited ‘disobedient and hostile’ behavior pattern. The IRS mined the data to catch tax avoiders. Very large amounts of money had been recovered. A few of the targets had been driven into poverty, sometimes suicide, over minor violations. Organized crime mined the data for blackmail purposes – one of the FBI computer engineers got himself in trouble with an underage girl and agreed to secretly download and provide the collected files to them. The blackmail business was booming.

Despite the substantial budget, the FBI was struggling to contain ballooning costs. Especially in the Information and Technology Branch where the shortage of qualified people and competition with the private sector combined to keep expenses high. A year ago, a solution was found – to bring in contractors from FreedomShield, Inc. Some protesting voices have been raised, questioning how come an external company could provide such services cheaper and, generally, the wisdom of using contractors in such a sensitive position. But FreedomShield had a stellar reputation, was a local Virginia company, their employees had Top Secret clearances and passed extensive background checks. And FreedomShield had many friends in Washington. They received the contract, the government saved money, everyone was happy.

When the FBI director Miller instructed his trusted lieutenant Rob Pulson to quietly initiate comprehensive surveillance of John Dimon and Jeff Kron, Pulson bypassed the head of the Information and Technology Branch and relayed this request to his protégé Mouli Chakrapani, the man in charge of special electronic surveillance projects. Chakrapani was loyal to Pulson. He had the surveillance set up and started passing the daily reports up the chain.

The man who actually programmed the surveillance, like most people in the Information and Technology Branch, was a contractor working for FreedomShield. Unbeknown to Chakrapani, the gathered data started going in parallel to another data center about a hundred miles away. It joined a large feed already flowing in the same direction. Normally, the data center’s security systems would have raised an alarm. But the person managing the network security alerts was another FreedomShield employee with the
super user
privileges and she exempted this particular connection as “allowed.”