by Nick Cook
I get up, take a step toward it. Out of the corner of my eye, I see somebody silhouetted at the base of the stairwell. He must have worked his way behind Hetta, through the ducting.
I glance at the SR-16.
‘Don’t even …’ the guy breathes. I can’t see his face. It’s in shadow. With his gun, he lets me know what he’ll do to Hayden.
He spins me around, shoves his rifle into the small of my back and starts to push me up the stairs. Standing at the top, half in shadow, holding her gun in front of her with both hands, is Hetta.
The guy sees her too. He drops his rifle, grabs me around the neck and jams a pistol against my temple. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he yells.
I look down. He’s wearing a pair of Nike Airs.
‘Josh?’ Her voice is eerily calm. ‘You OK?’
Is she kidding me?
He tightens his grip around my neck.
‘You’re going to be all right.’
Shut the hell up, Hetta.
‘I’m going to get you out of this.’
He squeezes my neck so hard I can’t breathe.
Shoot him, fuck’s sake.
‘You know who this guy is?’
I don’t care. Shoot him.
‘Tell me who he is, Josh.’
I can’t. I can’t breathe. Shoot him, shoot him.
‘His name, Josh.’
I twist enough to allow me to gulp some air.
As Karl Dempf’s body tenses, she fires.
The Humvees belong to a Utah National Guard unit. The territory on which we’ve landed, like the Utah Data Center itself, is leased from the military by the NSA. The twenty-five-man platoon had been taking part in an exercise on the other side of the ridge when they saw the helicopters land and drove over to investigate.
By the time we emerge from two levels below ground, accompanied by two CATs carrying Hayden on a litter, Graham has persuaded the unit’s commanding officer to transport him to a military hospital outside Salt Lake City, supervised by one of their medics.
Hetta and I retreat to the entranceway of the bunker so that we can sitrep Reuben, but I’m stopped from making the call by Graham waving his cellphone.
‘Guy from our local field office is on the line,’ he says, like this is an entirely normal thing. ‘Wants to speak with you.’
He hands Hetta the phone.
Hetta frowns. She looks at me and switches to speaker.
‘This is Agent Hart. Who am I speaking to?’
‘Rich Lewis, ma’am. Deputy Special Agent in Charge, Salt Lake.’ His voice bounces off the concrete walls. ‘You at the site?’
‘The site?’
‘The UDC at Bluffdale, ma’am.’
‘Please state your business, Agent Lewis.’
‘A man walked in here fifteen minutes ago. Says he has information to do with an investigation you’re running out of D.C.’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘Nothing. He’ll only speak with you.’
‘Name?’
‘Say again.’
‘What’s his fucking name?’
‘Oh … His driver’s license says Jon … J-O-N … Silver. S-I-L-V-E-R. Forty-two. Says he’s a contractor out there. He’s real jumpy. Claims Silver ain’t his real name too; says it’s really Schweizer. Doctor Joel Schweizer. S-C-H-W-E-I-Z-E-R.’
37
SCHWEIZER IS NURSING A DAY’S STUBBLE. HE IS PALE, DRAWN and much older than he was in the photos we circulated in the Sit Room. From the rings around his eyes, it’s clear it’s at least twenty-four hours since he’s had any sleep. His hands shake; he must be on some kind of amphetamine.
‘You get every detail of what I know and built,’ he says, glancing rapidly between us. ‘But I need you to promise me immunity. And protection.’
The various acts passed by various administrations giving whistleblowers a measure of protection do not extend to private contractors, only to direct employees of the intelligence community, though there is no guarantee you’ll avoid a jail sentence under the Espionage Act.
‘I can get you an audience with the President,’ I tell him. ‘But first you’re going to have to give us some indication of what you’ve got.’
‘How about a list of every fucking contractor that ever worked on the Grid’s software.’ His eyes dart between Hetta’s and mine.
‘The Grid?’
Hetta puts her phone on the table and presses record.
‘The Grid is what it’s called. The place is called the Canyon.’ He slides a USB stick across to her.
Hetta picks it up, looks at it.
‘Encrypted, obviously. Names, dates, places. And a bunch of schedule data that includes a list of upgrades that will bring the system to full operating capability. You get all that when I’m in front of Thompson. Say yes and you get a sample now.’
There’s nothing to discuss. I say yes.
Hetta leans in. ‘How did you know to contact me?’
‘I built a backdoor. I knew you were coming, maybe before you did. And before they did.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The people in charge.’ He pauses. ‘How much of it did they leave intact?’
‘There’s some fragmentation damage in what looks like a control center.’
‘And the server chambers?’
‘More substantial, but repairable.’
‘It looks like they’re trying to send a message,’ he says.
‘Who?’ Hetta asks again.
‘I have no idea. Really. The NSA contracts all this stuff out. I report to a manager, he reports to a supervisor, who reports to a technical director and only then is there likely to be any interface with the agency itself. Tracking who knew what and when is going to take weeks, months … years. Shit, the way they’ve compartmentalized the program, you may never fucking know.’
‘So when did the evacuation order go out?’ Hetta asks.
‘Late last night. I got a coded notification not to show for work. The security apes have been jittery since Gapes showed up in D.C. The whole Canyon has been on standby to evacuate.’
‘Why not do it sooner?’ I ask.
‘My bet is they were counting on containment, but like that kid with his pinkie in the dyke, the leaks became unstoppable. I live close to the site and saw your helicopters fly in.’
‘What is the status of the system?’ Hetta asks.
He says it’s at what is known as Phase 4.
‘Phase 4 isn’t the all-up gig. It has a lot of bugs. There are – were – efforts underway to eliminate them. Right now, we still have to render the visuals. It can take a day, sometimes longer, for raw data to undergo the rendering process. And there are other flaws.’
‘Like the fact it can’t track certain people?’
‘That’s one of them.’
‘Why can’t it?’
He looks at me. ‘Why can’t it what?’
‘Track them?’
‘I don’t know. I told you; it’s what we termed an operational prototype. But …’
‘Yes?’
‘It appears that some people – a very few – have developed an ability to counter it.’
‘Counter it?’
‘As in jam, Colonel.’
‘That, I imagine, included Gapes.’
‘Clearly,’ he tells me. ‘Or they’d have found him.’
‘Why’d he run?’ Hetta asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘I knew about him. After his AWOL stunt, everybody did.’
‘What did they say?’
‘That he’d done a Snowden. As in stolen a bunch of files. I never met the guy, but Kaufmann did. He and Gapes worked on HITS. Kaufmann was front-of-house. I was the interface guy.’
‘The guy who used a highly developed quantum computing architecture as a stand-in for the brain’s processing ability,’ Hetta says. ‘We managed to
track your career as far as Oak Ridge.’
His eyes gleam. ‘The subconscious part of the brain, the stuff we do without thinking, is, in essence, nothing but a quantum computer, Agent Hart.’
‘Why the NSA?’ she asks.
‘After Harvard, I got to work on some of the coolest computers on the planet. Kaufmann took a different path. He’d spoken up for what he believed in – what the data was telling him. The establishment, however, took a more measured view.’
‘So, they killed him, huh?’ Hetta says.
‘Psychic ability hinges on subtle differences in the way a psychic’s brain is wired. Without knowing how they do it, Gapes and his trainer Koori pulled what the rest of us call psychic phenomena – ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy – from the ether, aka Kaufmann’s holosphere.
‘The holosphere turns out to be nothing more mysterious than an infinity of data points made up of sub-atomic particles that blink in and out of existence. When they blink out, we don’t know where they go, except that they’re somewhere beyond the bounds of classical space-time. When they blink back in, they appear as transient standing waves encoded with data.’
‘So?’
‘That’s what the Grid does, Agent Hart – it taps data. Kaufmann’s problem was believing the data was mystical – that it was pure consciousness – and should never have been weaponized. But the guy had done his deal with the devil. He’d taken the military’s money, because nobody else would give him any, and when he told them he wanted out, they killed him. Made it look like a heart attack. Gapes took the only other way out.’
I nod. ‘But after the helicopter crash, he was a wreck.’
‘We calibrated the Grid in the same way we calibrated HITS. Gapes was incredibly gifted, but for the Grid’s calibration process, and in light of his injuries, he worked best when there was somebody with him.’
A thought flickers somewhere at the back of my mind but fails to catch light. I ask him about the dreams and nightmares instead.
‘Some people develop a resistance to being interrogated. When the subconscious part of their brain resists, for a reason we don’t fully understand, they can develop psychological problems.’
Flashbacks that are so real they conjured what I took to be the truck that killed Hope coming at me on the road to Thurmont.
And the President’s nightmares.
‘Who was responsible for assigning targets?’ Hetta asks.
‘A cell back east.’
‘Where back east?’
‘I don’t know. We provided it with a feed. The cell saw what we saw. My strong hunch is that it’s buried inside the Cube.’
‘Thompson is going to tear the whole thing down. You know that, don’t you?’
Schweizer looks at me. ‘You think?’
He shakes his head and laughs.
As soon as the Comet clears the Salt Lake Air Route Traffic Control Center, somewhere east of Colorado Springs, I put in a call to Reuben.
I repeat what he will have got already in a sitrep from Cabot: that the raid was successful, that ‘the system’ is no longer operational and that the mop-up operation under Graham – working out of the Salt Lake field office – is ongoing.
I tell him that we have a key witness and that what he has to say is for Thompson’s ears only. Then again, Reuben is Thompson’s ears.
But I still have more questions than answers.
I don’t know why Gapes ran.
I don’t know how the threat he directed me to relates to the President.
Nor do I know how it connects to the Engineer – or if the Engineer is even real.
I do know that the threat converges on Jerusalem.
And that somebody on the inside – somebody with a connection to the Grid – didn’t want us to know three things:
About its existence;
About a component for a nuclear weapon our own experts had trouble identifying;
And about a Russian tech entrepreneur called Ilitch, an oligarch with a connection to Ted van Buren.
But, thanks to Gapes’s trail of clues, I do know:
About a technological breakthrough that can see events – past and present;
That it messes with our thought patterns and produces strange, hallucinatory dream-flashbacks;
That there is a cabal within our intelligence community that went to great lengths to cover it up;
That Thompson’s nightmares started nine months ago; and this is when their interest in him began.
So, this is what I’m left with:
Why then?
And who are they?
‘Josh …?’
Reuben is still on the line.
‘General Johansson and his staff are being held in a secure facility at Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling, as are all the other principal witnesses we spoke about.’ It is past 3 a.m. on the East Coast and Reuben, like the rest of us, will have had little or no sleep. But I hear the relief in his voice, and, perhaps, a sense that things in D.C. are, at last, returning to a modicum of control.
Amongst the other principal witnesses are key INSCOM personnel, including Gapes’s monitor, Cal Offutt; C-level executives of Triple Z; Katya; her boss, Charles Land; and TVB.
The concession I’ve got from Reuben is that I’ll debrief TVB.
The joint base is on the east bank of the Potomac, across the river from Reagan National. It hosts a little-known Homeland Security compound with a below-ground suite for the covert detention and interrogation of terrorists. If the press does get a hold of it, Johansson is being questioned about historical abuse of PoWs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community.
Only around half a dozen of them have the power, reach and influence (a) to have known about the Grid, and (b) to have orchestrated the clean-up operation.
I list them: INSCOM, the CIA, the DIA, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Intelligence Branch of the FBI and the NSA.
Their heads report to the Director of National Intelligence.
And the DNI reports to the President.
‘We bring them all in – the whole damn lot of them – and we put Cabot in charge of the round-up.’ Cabot’s the only person with connections to the intelligence community I actually trust.
‘Where?’ Reuben asks.
‘Somewhere discreet and out of the way.’
‘Which rules out Anacostia–Bolling.’
After a short discussion, we agree on Camp David.
‘And if none of them talks?’ Reuben asks.
‘They will. If they’d wanted to destroy it, they would have. They need to negotiate, because they’re not going to give it up.’
I open my eyes. Hetta is standing in front of me, holding two cups of coffee. I look at my watch. We’re somewhere over the Great Plains – a little less than two hours before we land.
‘Get any sleep?’
I shake my head. An hour has passed in a blur of half-formed thoughts and semi-lucid dreams about Schweizer, the Grid and how it came to be funded. She sits on the other side of the stained Formica and hands me a cup. I glance at Schweizer, out for the count in a seat across the aisle, a jacket half covering his chest and shoulders.
It takes her a minute to spell out what’s on her mind.
‘Are you angry with me, Josh?’
‘Should I be?’
‘I put two rounds in Dempf’s head. Which was pretty close to yours.’
‘Most people wouldn’t have taken the shot. You did.’ I take a sip of her coffee. It tastes terrible, but it does the job. I’m awake.
‘I wasn’t afraid,’ she says.
‘Good.’
‘No. Not good.’
OK. Hetta Hart is trying to tell me something. I prop myself up on my elbows.
‘I’m not asking for your professional opinion, you understand. I wouldn’t want you to think—’
‘Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, Hetta?’
She brushe
s the crumbs of some agent’s meal off the seat beside her.
‘I told you about my brother …’
‘Which one?’
‘Mikey.’
‘Which one’s Mikey?’
‘The eldest. The cop. I’d just graduated from Quantico. It was Thanksgiving. We were all home for the weekend …’
The Comet hits some turbulence. We clutch our coffees and wait till the shaking stops.
‘Mom and I heard a shout. We were out back, talking. It was late. My uncle was closing up the bar. Mikey was helping. I ran into the bar and this addict’s got a fistful of my uncle’s hair and a knife to his throat and he’s yelling at him to open up the register. Mikey’s a meter or two away, pistol drawn. He’s yelling at the guy to drop the knife, but the guy’s screaming and yelling, too; he’s completely off his head.
‘And here’s the thing, Josh. I know what to do – and it isn’t what Mikey’s doing, which is: Drop the knife. Drop the knife. Drop the knife. I have to take charge. And I got to do it now or my uncle’s going to die. I step forward, Mikey sees me and shoves me out the way, because I’m just his little sister and I shouldn’t be in the line of fire. And that’s the moment the smack-head drops the knife, draws a thirty-eight and fires a round point-blank into Mikey.’
She pauses. ‘I see what happens next in slow-mo. Mikey falling to the floor. The smack-head turning toward me. Leveling his gun. And then this weird thing happens. Time kind of stops.’
That’s not so weird, I start to explain. The slowing of time, which is what some people experience, a review of their entire life, in the second before they think they’re going to die, is unexplained, but some scientists believe it’s another survival mechanism: the brain searching our life’s experience to find something, anything, that can save us when the chips are down and there’s no hope.
‘You weren’t afraid?’
‘I’ve never been afraid, Josh. Of anything. Right from when I was little.’
‘Tell me Mikey lived.’
‘Yes, thank God.’
‘And the guy with the knife?’
‘An ex-guy with a knife.’
‘You shot him?’
She nods.
‘And your uncle?’
‘Shaken, but OK.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Twenty-one.’ She pauses. ‘I’ve never talked to anybody about this. You think I should?’
