White: A Novel (17 page)

Sirad held up her hand like a grade-schooler. This man was right, of course: Jordan Mitchell had entrusted three others with portions of the key. She was one of them.

“So you diversify,” she said. “You divide the secret into sections and share it among a small group of principals.”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” the Afro-clad scientist affirmed. “But how do you keep them from collaborating against you?”

He stood up, walked to Ravi’s white board, and began to draw.

“Let’s call it the ‘Rabbit Hole paradox.’”

The man drew a crude representation of the seventeenth floor facility’s front door.

“Let’s say access to this room is based on a secret word instead of a cipher lock. And let’s say you want to prove to the security guard that you know that secret word without actually telling him what it is.”

Sirad nodded. She had just faced a similar situation. If not for her stunning smile, she might not have gotten in without her badge.

“What you need is a zero knowledge, interactive proof protocol that will show the security guard that you know the word without actually disclosing it. You send him into a control room where he can watch on CCTV but cannot hear. You simply call out the code word, the door opens, and in you go. He sees this and accepts the fact that you know the code.”

“What if I simply guess the proper word?” Sirad asked. “Or what if someone opens it from the other side without the guard seeing?”

“Precisely. There are any number of ways you could defeat a system like this. So you set up enough doors and enough repetitions that the tester can feel confident of a very small statistical likelihood for folderol.”

Hamid and Sirad understood at the same moment.

“This is someone from inside the company?” Hamid asked.

“As one who deals in probability and statistical likelihood, I would have to assume that, yes,” Ravi said.

Sirad thought hard about what to say next.

“That puts us in a very tough position, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“And you also have to consider the possibility that one aspect of the key has simply been stolen,” Ravi added.

Sirad looked around the room. These faces were all new to her. She needed their expertise, but whom could she trust?

“Rather sticky, isn’t it?” the I Can’t Dunk man said. “And now you see the first theorem of secrecy: in a closed system, the universe of principals is inversely square to the probability of compromise.”

“The toughest thing about secrets,” Ravi explained, “is deciding who gets to keep them.”

A POLITE IF
firm E-5 met Jeremy downstairs and motioned him into a blue Navy van.

“Welcome to the Point,” he said. A bright gold-capped tooth punctuated his broad smile. “First time down here?”

“Yes.” Jeremy rubbed sleep out of his eyes. He hated the flat gray reality that followed overseas gigs, when your mind gives up its refusal to sleep and suddenly demands it.

After a quick cup of coffee and a ride to building 1217, Jeremy thanked the sergeant and climbed out of the van in front of what looked like a western European row house. An air force major met him with a handshake.

“Morning,” the perfectly creased officer greeted his guest. He offered no name. “Sleep well?”

“Slept fine, sir,” Jeremy lied again. He tried to concentrate on pleasantries, but the surroundings distracted him to the point of mention.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Major,” Jeremy said. The driver had dropped him off at the edge of what looked like a massive Hollywood studio lot. “But I didn’t get much of a briefing before coming down. Where the hell are we?”

The major started laughing as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“Welcome to MOUT facility, Harvey Point,” he said. “Military Operations Urban Terrain. Sixteen square blocks of any damned city in the world. This morning’s briefing will be in Munich. Head three blocks down Menkestrasse and you’ll find yourself in a little Basque village called Guillermo. London’s a couple blocks that way. We can design, engineer, and rough out virtually any interior you can imagine within twelve hours. Even less time in simulation—that’s primarily where you’ll do most of your preparation.”

“You build fake cities?”

“Just blocks, really, and it depends on what you call fake. Come on up and I’ll show you.”

He led Jeremy inside the row house, up an elevator, and into an open room filled with closed-circuit television monitors, recording equipment, giant wall maps, computers, and blueprints. Digital clocks on the wall covered every time zone on earth, with Greenwich perched in the middle and labeled
ZULU
.

A big sign on the wall read,
THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS.

“Welcome to postproduction,” the major said. “We’ve got monitoring capability that allows us to stage up to four scenarios simultaneously. That’s just on-property. We’ve got about ten thousand acres of woodland and rural training grounds, too, but that’s run from a separate facility.”

“Scenarios for what?” Jeremy asked. He immediately regretted the question. The major gave him the same look Jesús had during the Yemen mission. Then he started laughing. “Oh, right . . . good one. You Agency guys are always so big on your opsec.”

Agency guys?
Jeremy thought.

“You ready to get started?”

Jeremy shrugged his shoulders. He remembered one of the questions on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory HRT had given him during selection. “Have you ever read
Alice in Wonderland?
” it asked. Suddenly it made perfect sense. Life on the wet side was a whole lot like chasing Alice.

“Sure,” Jeremy replied. “Lead the way.”

The major took him to a warehouse just outside “London.” Inside, he met four men, all white and all between the ages of thirty and fifty.

John, who offered no last name, said he was a theologian at the Yale Divinity School. Paul introduced himself to be a clinical psychologist from Johns Hopkins. George claimed he was an army intelligence analyst assigned to Boling Air Force Base. Fred offered no background but promised to give Jeremy a thorough rundown on telltale signs of chemical and biological weapon production.

“I’m not going to try and make you a molecular biologist,” he said. “Just want to teach you the subtle differences between phosphate-based fertilizer and WMD nerve agents. We might cook us up a little beer in the process, too.”

Hollywood back lots? Postproduction facilities? Cooking beer?
Jeremy wondered to himself. All Jesús had told him was that he was going on a little trip.

“I’m Jeremy,” Waller said. “I work for the Justice Department.”

“Good cover.” John chuckled. “First time I’ve heard that one.”

BEECHUM STOOD AT
the end of the table, obviously shocked. The president of the United States, if she had heard him correctly, had just proposed taking military action against a long-standing Middle Eastern ally.

“You cannot launch a preemptive strike against the Saudis based on stereotypes and speculation!” she exclaimed.

Whether it was the hour, the location, or the simple lack of reason on the president’s part, she felt compelled to intervene.

“We have credible and actionable intelligence here, Elizabeth,” the president shot back. “I know you feel that your time on the Senate Intelligence Committee gives you some kind of cloak-and-dagger insight, but you’re not in the Senate anymore. You work for me, and this president smells Saudi.”

“We do have some positive developments,” Havelock said, trying to ease the tension. “The NSA has intercepted four separate open-line communications that you might find interesting.”

Havelock held out his hand, and Vick passed him a half-inch-thick stack of overhear transcripts.

“These are more than casual conversations,” he said, waving the documents in the air. “Specific times, dates, locations. Two regional government ministers talking with what we believe are operatives inside the United States. The calls were on Quantis phones, but we are trying to trace them.”

“The NSA can’t track domestic calls,” Beechum objected. “That’s illegal.”

“So is blowing up Wal-Mart!” Havelock bellowed. The stress had apparently begun to wear on him too.

“What do you mean we can’t track domestic calls?” the president asked. “Why not?”

“Something called the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the vice president told him. “The NSA surveys international calls indiscriminately, because noncitizens are not protected against unreasonable search and seizure. If we want a wire intercept in-CONUS, we either obtain a Title III warrant or FISA authorization.”

Venable looked confused.

“This is war, Mr. President,” Havelock said. Vick seemed to agree. Alred shook his head and sighed.

“I’ve got to agree, David,” the secretary of defense joined in. “If the Saudis are financing terrorist operations against U.S. civilian targets, I don’t see how listening to their phone calls is going to violate anyone’s constitutional rights.”

“Alred?” the president asked. He had come to rely heavily on the FBI director’s judgment.

“That’s a question for DOJ lawyers,” he said. “Quite frankly, sir, I think the bigger issue is trying to stop the next round of attacks.”

“Yes,” Venable agreed. “Good point. I don’t want to hear any more of these legal conundrums, understood? If there is an issue for general counsel, straighten it out before it crosses my desk . . . my podium . . . before I . . .”

The president seemed to drift from his train of thought.

“What about the issue of taking preemptive military action against the Saudis?” the secretary of defense asked. “You’ll forgive an old war horse for saying so, Mr. President, but I’d rather exercise a little muscle now than pull out another truckload of body bags later.”

“Muscle?” Beechum asked. She had tried to remain silent during the meeting but really didn’t like what he was suggesting. “Saudi Arabia is a longtime ally—strategic and financial. They control OPEC. If we try any muscle flexing with them, we’re going to be paying seven bucks a gallon for gas.”

“Richard?” the president asked. Richard Crabb, his secretary of state, had said nothing to this point.

“By definition I advocate diplomacy,” he said. “The options as I see them are to go public with intelligence, appeal to the UN Security Council, launch special operations attacks against specific targets, or simply to offer the Saudis the same courtesy we’d hope for: if we have enough evidence to flex muscle, as you call it, we certainly must have enough evidence to confront the ambassador. Has it occurred to anyone that the Crown Prince may be as surprised and outraged as we are?”

“That’s a darned good point,” the president agreed. He seemed to swell up with optimism again. “Objections?”

Havelock looked at Vick, who looked at the secretary of defense, but no one spoke out.

“Good!” Venable exclaimed. “Make the call.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Havelock pointed out.

“Damn the hour, man,” came the response. “The ambassador is a practical man. I’m sure he’s going to prefer an early morning face-to-face more than war.”

JEREMY’S WORLD HAD
spun again. First, and most important, he had learned that his mission was to infiltrate a little-known shadow arm of the Christian Identity Movement called the Phineas Priesthood.

Small, violent, and diffuse, the Phineas Priesthood had operated for more than a decade under an organizational rubric known as “leaderless resistance.” With no formal membership or organization, true believers gained priest status by committing Phineas “acts”—violent attacks against a society they saw as corrupt and morally bereft. Most targets were nonwhite, but they drew no race distinctions when it came to homosexuals, mixed marriages, and abortion. The group’s inherent lack of structure had prevented law enforcement from penetrating its cells, but it had also restricted mission effectiveness.

Until now.

Recent intelligence suggested that a former Special Forces colonel named Ellis had brought a number of these domestic terrorists together and trained them at a central Texas ranch called the Homestead. Jeremy knew of the place, ironically, because several HRT snipers had attended schools there.

The job sounded simple though not very easy. Jeremy had to infiltrate the group by registering as a student and then convincing Ellis that he was in fact a Phineas priest. Because there was no formal membership, anyone could claim that status, but Jeremy would have to demonstrate provenance: proof of some act of violence committed within the past few years. The only problem was that a real priest may already have listed the crime in question on his own curriculum vitae.

From what Jeremy had seen during the day’s intelligence briefings, the slightest misstep could lead to a very violent and sudden end to this operation. And his life.

“Are you familiar with the program?” the latest in a series of briefers asked.

Jeremy actually recognized the man as a supervisor with the FBI’s Undercover Safeguard Unit back in Quantico. Sergei Andropov had carved himself a place in the Bureau’s history books by infiltrating the Russian mob in New York, but not without cost. He’d lost his left hand to a “fixer’s” knife just prior to taking the whole thing down. And he’d become addicted to heroin. Undercover work definitely had a downside.

“Not really,” Jeremy said. His overseas missions had come with no formal training.

“Well, then we’ve got twenty-four hours to whip you into shape,” he said, clinging to the remnants of a Gorki accent. “First we get settled into your new identity.”

Andropov pulled a manila folder out of an old Samsonite briefcase—the kind Jeremy had seen Hoover-era veterans carrying in his first office.

“Your new Lambda Chi name is Jeremy Walker.” The big Russian laughed at the reference to his favorite American movie.

“Walker? Isn’t that a little close to home?”

“Supposed to be. It is better to stick with a name close to yours in case someone recognizes you and calls it out in a public place,” Andropov advised. “Is always best to stick close to the truth. That way you don’t trip up so easy.”