The Grid

by Nick Cook

  ‘How would you define the difference?’

  ‘It’s hard to work in this area and not have a sense of connection with the great unknown. Duke did. I’m not a viewer, and I do. But the Christian thing? No. He wasn’t into that at all.’

  ‘Any affiliations with extremists? The far right?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No way. In any case, we were polygraphed every couple of months. If Duke had belonged to any kind of proscribed organization, the lie-detector Gestapo would have known.’

  ‘What about his mental state?’

  He describes some of the symptoms I saw in the tower: the speech and muscle spasms that were the result of the brain injury he received in Iraq. He confirms what I’d read in his medical report, that he got bad headaches, too. But when I ask if Gapes was delusional, Offutt shakes his head.

  ‘You mean, like, serious mental issues? No way. Actually, I—’

  Johansson cuts across him. ‘The guy was clearly sick.’

  Hetta looks up sharply from her notes. ‘You said that you and Gapes never met?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Then how can you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That he was sick.’

  ‘Check out his psych report. The guy was delusional and on medication. An anti-psychotic.’

  ‘It’s highly likely that his notes had been doctored,’ I say. ‘And besides, it’s hard to be mentally ill and a bona fide traitor, isn’t it?’

  Johansson’s expression drops another ten degrees. ‘Your specialism is post-traumatic stress, correct?’

  ‘It is, yes.’

  ‘Do you know how much trauma my men get to encounter every day of the week?’

  ‘I ran a center for the treatment of trauma-related illness, General. So yes, I do.’

  ‘Then, under your classification, I have no doubt that half the men under my command suffer some form of PTSD. But you know what? They just get on with the job. They do it because they have a keen sense of patriotism. Duty, Colonel. Every day, they die to keep us safe.’ He looks at his watch. ‘This interview is now terminated. I have transport waiting to take me to the Pentagon.’

  ‘General Johansson?’

  He turns impatiently to Hetta. She doesn’t move a muscle.

  ‘As I made clear, sir, this is an official investigation into multiple murder and a conspiracy to kill the President. It will be over when we say it is.’

  Johansson stiffens. The glint of steel in his gray eyes tells me that the appeal of Hetta’s imminent rendition may have crossed his mind. But he maintains his silence.

  I turn back to Offutt. ‘When we were in the tower, Duke said something that I’m struggling to understand. He talked about ground truth.’

  ‘Yes.’ The Major glances uneasily at Johansson.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It has military, er, usage, of course …’

  ‘Beyond that?’

  ‘Duke and I …’

  I wait.

  ‘Viewers need feedback, Colonel. When you remote view, you’re not always convinced that what you’ve seen is real. So feedback from the target becomes important. It helps the viewer to refine his accuracy. To know he’s on the right path. It was the primary reason we started collocating viewers with the Activity’s assault units – so that they could get near instant feedback.’

  ‘Duke said that he’d found ground truth by looking at me. What could he have possibly meant by that?’

  ‘Easy,’ Offutt says. ‘It meant you were the target.’

  29

  THE US ARMY RESEARCH LABORATORY IS SPREAD ACROSS VARIOUS centers around the country. Its East Coast contracts office sits in the basement of a large gray building in a tree-lined suburb of Bethesda, two minutes off Washington’s Beltway.

  Since emerging from the bunker a little over an hour ago, I’ve been hit by a stream of messages from Reuben, asking then demanding I get back to the White House. But he hasn’t told me why, and, as Hetta points out, if we don’t take advantage of this window of opportunity at the Army Research Lab, we may never get another.

  I’ll have to deal with Reuben when we’re done here. Hetta has tucked our phones into her magic case, so that anybody interested in us can’t track our movements. And she has taken the precaution of getting one of her colleagues at HQ to monitor traffic around us on automatic number plate recognition.

  Betty the contracts officer keeps her eyes locked on her screen as she talks and types. She asks for the reference number again.

  Hetta repeats the code Christy supplied. To view it online, we’d have to access the military’s version of the Web. Onsite is a whole lot safer.

  ‘Here you go.’ Betty drops a wad of printouts onto the desk and we take them to the far side of the room.

  The agreement covers an applied theoretical study into a helmet-mounted Holographic Information Transfer System by Baltimore’s Central Institute of Technology, effective 1 March 2006, completion a year and a half later, value: $147,998.65.

  The principal contact was a Dr Elliott Kaufmann.

  Hetta hands me an attachment, a progress report with a picture of an oldish guy, sixties or seventies maybe, bearded, in an odd-looking helmet. Stani Koori, the caption reads, testing the HITS unit.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘The guy who trained Gapes. Once described as the world’s greatest psychic. After 9/11, the CIA contracted him to train the remote viewers. Gapes was one of them.’

  We move on.

  Eight years ago there was a big funding jump, to $1.2 million, for a second-generation helmet. A delay in testing the Gen 2 system is put down to Koori’s withdrawal from the program, and their search for a replacement.

  The next image contains a dozen views of the helmet. In one of them, I can see six electrodes, evenly spaced on its inner rim.

  Gapes was involved the following year, not Koori, but his name isn’t mentioned, which is why none of this was picked up in our trawls, and why it was overlooked by whoever switched it for Voss’s and altered his medical records.

  There’s another photo: Gapes in combats, wearing the helmet, giving the camera a thumbs-up – after the brain injury, but clearly before the crash.

  Around this time, a Dr Joel Schweizer has joined Kaufmann, and the contract is renewed at $1.45 million, a relatively modest increase, for a Gen 3 helmet intended to communicate data from the holosphere – whatever that might be – on some kind of head-up display.

  Their experiment appears to have failed. ‘It is not known whether this was a hardware malfunction, an issue with the perceiver, or with the predicted theoretical approach.’ It also mentions some ‘psychic disturbance’ among the targets.

  The contract value then dropped by more than half, and the year after to nothing at all. ‘Project terminated due to inability of hardware/testing to corroborate theoretical approach.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough.’ Hetta rolls up the paperwork and tucks it inside her fleece-lined jacket. ‘OK, Josh. Let’s go.’

  Josh.

  Wow.

  Ten minutes later, we take an exit off the Beltway and park up next to a row of stores sandwiched between a garage and an office stationery outlet. It’s raining a lot harder. Water pools on the road and the sidewalks.

  Heads down, we run from the car into an Internet cafe, and Hetta orders two straight blacks from a guy with tats on his neck and quarter-sized gauges in his ears. He looks as if he’s from a long-lost Amazon tribe. He starts to hit on her as she pays. She completely ignores him.

  We retire to a line of shabby desktops at the back. Hetta spends a minute cleaning the nearest keyboard. An eye-watering bouquet of disinfectant and drains hits us from the nearby restrooms.

  She logs on using a proxy IP address. ‘OK, we got him. Dr Joel Schweizer. Computer scientist. Harvard 2001 to 2003. Founds Sub-Quantum Dynetics LLC down the road in Gaithersburg in 2005.’

  She types some more then sits back and taps her teeth with her pen. ‘
Let’s see … Nothing, nothing, nothing for several years. Then this: Wired tells us that S-Q Dynetics sells its first computer to Microsoft.

  ‘Two years later, it reports the sale of a system to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the year after, to an unspecified intelligence outfit …’

  She punches in another name.

  ‘OK, so you’ve been busy too, haven’t you, Dr Elliott P. Kaufmann Jr? … Yup … Harvard again, 2002 to 2004, where he begins work on the architecture of a …’

  Her nose wrinkles.

  I lean forward. ‘A phase-conjugate coupling device to the quantum holosphere.’ I look at her. ‘Any idea what that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thought you majored in computer science.’

  ‘I did. But this is like another language.’

  She scrolls down. ‘2007, Kaufmann gets a programming job with Baltimore CIT. I guess whatever he was working on at Harvard wasn’t paying the bills.’

  ‘Keep going. Schweizer shows up on the research contract seven years ago. And we know that S-Q Dynetics supplied equipment to DARPA and Microsoft as well as to an unspecified intelligence outfit.’

  Hetta types some more. ‘OK, so S-Q Dynetics doesn’t have a website, because –’ the logo of the Securities and Exchange Commission appears, ‘– it went out of business a little over three years ago.’

  She keeps on going. ‘They had aspirations to be the world’s first commercial quantum computing company. What do you know about quantum computers?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘They told us at PIAD that they can simulate in ten nanoseconds what it takes evolution to do in twenty years.’

  ‘So, Kaufmann, back in the day, had written about something that couples to something called a holosphere. He leaves Harvard, takes a regular day job at Baltimore CIT, working away on what turns out to be the Holographic Information Transfer System. But he doesn’t achieve a whole lot with it, until Schweizer shows up.’

  She nods. ‘Then, working together, they develop a third generation helmet, which, according to the contract, seeks to throw data from this holosphere onto some kind of visual display. But then the contract gets cut, because the system –’ she picks up her notes, ‘– fails to communicate data from the virtual quantum state in the way it was meant to. There was a problem with something called the perceiver.’

  ‘Not something. Someone. They used Gapes to calibrate it. Initially, they’d used this guy Koori, but that didn’t work out, so they brought Gapes in instead. The marks on his head correspond to electrodes on the helmet. And check out those dates. The system starts to go wrong and they kill the contract the year before he goes AWOL. And I’m guessing Schweizer and Kaufmann will have disappeared too.’

  And the Pentagon had paid compensation to Lou and Misty, buying their silence. That should have been the end of it. But then something happened that even the black world could not have been prepared for. Two years after the MPs first showed, the men in black arrived the day before Lou’s birthday and kicked down her trailer door.

  The first time was for show – what we were meant to see.

  The second was because Duke Gapes had run for real.

  The thirty-minute ride to the White House gives me some of the thinking time I need to assemble the case I’m about to put to Reuben.

  Kaufmann, a physics prodigy, gave a speech discussing his work soon after he arrived at Harvard – a few months after 9/11.

  He talked about the theoretical existence of a holosphere, in which information, alongside matter and energy, needed to be acknowledged as the ‘fabric of existence’ – a ‘substrate’ rooted in a ‘sub-atomic sea’ that science had yet to acknowledge.

  He dubbed it ‘nature’s memory’: an endless ocean of data held in the sub-atomic particles that subtend … well, everything.

  It prompted a stream of discussion amongst his peers in blogs, forums and user groups, all of them quoting Einstein, Planck, Pauli, Dirac, Heisenberg and Schrödinger. If the theory was valid, they said, there ought to be evidence for the holosphere’s existence.

  Kaufmann said there was: in eastern mysticism. Sadly for him, he kept right on digging, and the hole he dug got bigger and bigger. Then he jumped right in. Hebrews, he said, referred to the holosphere as The Book of God’s Remembrances. Early Christians as The Book of Life. Hindus as The Akashic Record. Jung’s Collective Unconscious was evidence of it too.

  Overnight, mainstream science vacated the building and ostracized Kaufmann for being too out-there.

  But we’d found a retired Army intelligence officer and Cold War-era remote viewer online. Paul H. Smith had come out of the woodwork after the remote viewing program had been trashed by the CIA, to describe the holosphere in much the same terms: as ‘an infinity of information points, with each representing an object, entity, being, event structure … an archive in the fullest sense: indifferent, dispassionate, with no capacity for judging; just data, pure and simple.’

  This ‘matrix’, Smith wrote, ‘catalogues human acts and events’, with all other facts about the universe to be found there as well: ‘information about animate and inanimate objects; about places, landscapes, substances, emotions, physical and non-physical qualities, artifacts, relations, things that are tangible and intangible, machines, history, personalities, everything …’

  When we’d read this, Hetta and I had looked at each other, neither of us saying a word, because we’d seen this matrix for ourselves: the pictures, photographs, sketches and printouts in the cabin – all five thousand of them: Of people, places, objects, things …

  When we’d met with Christy to discuss the three missing images from the cabin, we’d all assumed that Gapes’s paranoia at being sent to the desert had related to a deployment in some far-flung shit-hole. And that she should focus the full might of her intel resources accordingly.

  But everything we’ve just learned says her satellites have been pointing in the wrong direction.

  30

  I TRY TO FOCUS BEYOND THE WIPERS. IN THE HOMEBOUND rush-hour traffic I can hardly see a thing. ‘Two cars, you said?’

  ‘Four, in fact. A couple of SUVs paralleling us. Since we left the cafe. A red Toyota six in front and a black Fusion five behind.’

  I fight an instinct to turn as we head toward the next intersection.

  ‘Oh, and a silver Tahoe, a block away, crossing … now.’

  I nod, then check the wing mirror. See the Fusion. See the Toyota too. In the trade, it’s known as a ‘box’.

  ‘You get an alert?’ I haven’t noticed her check her cell.

  Her eyes dart between her mirror and the traffic ahead.

  ‘No.’

  So she spotted them. Well, she said she sees patterns.

  The Toyota ahead drives on and makes his turn. The Fusion behind us follows suit. The SUV to our right slots in three vehicles back. The Tahoe on our left now takes the lead. Do it right, and it’s almost impossible to get made. ‘Which tells me,’ she says, ‘these a-holes aren’t pros …’

  ‘Betty.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Schoolmarm back at the Army Research Lab. She must have tipped them off. Or there was some kind of trip-wire on the file we accessed.’

  She pulls an unregistered prepaid cell out of the glove box, hands it to me and reels off a number.

  ‘Who am I calling? Putin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know we were going to attract this kind of attention by heading to ARL?’

  ‘I allowed for the possibility.’

  ‘And showing Johansson the shell sketch?’

  ‘Same strategy.’

  ‘Christ, Hetta—’

  ‘What’s done is done, Josh. Please. Make that call.’

  I hit dial, activate the speaker, and keep one eye on the mirror as we wait for the connection.

  ‘Hetta?’ A voice I recognize.

  ‘Hey. Picked up some company.’ She glances at her GPS. ‘17th and F in ten?�
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  ‘You got it.’

  ‘DJ?’

  ‘Yup.’ His voice crackles.

  ‘Josh will be in the Lexus.’

  ‘What will you be in?’

  ‘Let you know in a minute.’

  She signs off.

  The traffic starts to bunch as we approach a red.

  I lose sight of the Fusion behind an articulated truck.

  Hetta brakes.

  ‘Undo your belt, Josh.’

  I move too fast and she touches my arm. ‘Slowly.’

  She opens her door and steps into the stationary traffic.

  I make for the sidewalk. She motions me around the front of the car to tuck in behind her. Rain seeps down my neck. Hetta draws her .357. We walk the length of the truck.

  The second we come into view, the guy lunges for something on the passenger seat. But Hetta is quicker. She smashes the window, opens the door, and by the time I’m alongside, she’s snapped a cuff around his left wrist and forced him into the passenger seat. I reach in and fasten the other end to the grab-handle above his head.

  She passes him the two-way radio he was going for.

  ‘Tell your buddies we made you and they’re more than welcome to follow us too, but – word of warning – when we get to where we’re going, there’s going to be a reception party.’

  Up ahead, a car horn sounds as the lights turn green.

  I run back to the Lexus and jump in behind the wheel.

  Ten minutes later, with the Fusion right behind me, I approach Lafayette Square. There’s an unusually heavy police presence. A protest is underway by the North Fence.

  I weave through people making their way to and from the edge of the crowd, finally pulling up on 17th and F, as close as I can get to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

  Fifty meters away, two squad cars, nose-to-nose, lights turning, block the end of the street. I’m wondering what next when a figure steps past the line of cops ranged across the street in front of them. DJ Wharton is dressed in a gray raincoat that looks uncomfortably tight across his lineman’s shoulders.

  Hetta, DJ and I gather in front of the Fusion.

  Hetta hands over her captive’s yellow two-way.