Black Fall

by Andrew Mayne

  If you can’t kill the man, make it look like you can come close.

  “What’s the point?” asks Jennifer.

  “Fear,” I reply. “Hysteria. Even the first lady is shaken by this. A constant state of fear.”

  “Distrust,” says Ailes after thinking it over. “They’ve damaged the credibility of the government, and now they’re going after the media, which is of course all too happy to run anything that trends.”

  “And Friedkin? Why does his name keep coming up?” I reply.

  Gerald nods to his computer. “I think he may actually be dead. This looks authentic. Not the coup part. But there are eyewitnesses saying he was shot in front of his house in Virginia.”

  “It’s such an odd thing. He’s not even that well-known a politician. Just one of those people whose names you occasionally hear on the news over the years.”

  Then why him? Hold on.

  Something comes back to me. “Hey? Remember how we couldn’t find out anything about the CCA? Except for that one mention in congressional testimony?”

  “Yes,” says Ailes. “Wait a second.” He starts typing on his phone. “Interesting . . . Friedkin was on the Senate public surveillance committee back in the early eighties. Hmm . . .” He sends a text message to someone. “Interesting,” he says again, lost in thought. “It seems likely that Friedkin would have been the one to give the sign-off on the project. Maybe he’s the one that shut it down too.”

  “And now he’s probably dead,” I reply. “And we’re supposed to think there’s some kind of internal power struggle between him and the president. I can only imagine what stories are going to come out next. If they can make us think Friedkin had some deliberate reason for wanting the president to step aside, then that moves us from just distrusting the government to thinking it’s illegitimate.”

  “But people aren’t that stupid,” says Jennifer.

  “It’s not a matter of being stupid,” I tell her. “It’s just sowing paranoia. Some people think September eleventh was an inside job, for reasons I still can’t understand. Same with the JFK assassination.”

  “This could incite the other radical groups,” Ailes suggests. “From the White Power Nation to the New Black Panthers. They’re already showing up in droves at the riots.” He checks his watch. “I’m going to put the pressure on some of my contacts. I want you guys to get on a helicopter and get to the CCA building now. Let’s start digging through that computer system.”

  We’re in the air thirty minutes later.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  VAX

  Gerald and Jennifer have the guts of the main computer spilled out on the floor of the control room, and they are on their hands and knees going over every part as I sit and watch from the command chair. The DEC VAX machine that served as the central processor was built into a cabinet behind the back wall, accessible on the other side from a service tunnel that wraps around the seventies-era futuristic room.

  I don’t know what to make of the parts, but Gerald and Jennifer seem to have no trouble figuring things out.

  “Looks like we should have borrowed some caveman flints from the Smithsonian,” I joke.

  Without looking up, Jennifer replies, “It could be worse. The original Apollo source code was stored on hard disks the size of a washing machine. At least this still works.”

  “Why not just try to get the code from the computer directly? Can’t you guys hack it or something?” Even as I say it, it already sounds stupid.

  “It could be booby-trapped,” says Gerald as he inspects a large motherboard.

  “Do we need the bomb squad?” I ask half seriously.

  “No. Nothing like that.” He points to a keyboard workstation. “I just mean if we start trying to get into the code from this computer, it might erase itself as a self-destruct. A lot of government hardware is designed to do that.” He holds up a small cable. “What we’re doing is connecting to the hard disk cable so we can copy the main file as it gets loaded into memory during boot up.”

  “What about encryption?” I ask.

  Jennifer snorts, then catches herself. “Sorry. It’s a good question. It’s just that this thing is from the early eighties. Your iPod could run a decryption algorithm that could break it.”

  “Good to know.” I decide to keep my helpful tips to myself. Jennifer and Gerald never try to make me feel stupid, and to be honest, I rarely do. I’ve seen them run circles around expert FBI technicians, so I don’t feel all that bad.

  Gerald stands up and checks his laptop, which sits on a console. “I think we’re ready. Jennifer?”

  She flips a switch, and the ancient computer’s huge disk drive whirs to life. The main screen flickers, and lines of code start to scroll upward.

  “Now what?” I ask.

  “We wait,” she says, taking a seat at an empty console to watch the code fly by.

  The last time we started the system, it took forever. I lean back and try to imagine what it would be like to run an actual operation from here. Was there a team of information warfare specialists all trained and waiting on standby for orders to go to war with whomever? Did they have uniforms?

  The idea of drone pilots sitting in dark rooms thousands of miles away from the battlefield is strange enough. What’s it like when you’re trying to be the puppet master of civil unrest?

  Do you high-five your teammates when you cause a blackout and rioting starts?

  How long do you just sit here waiting for something to happen?

  Or is this whole command center a delusion? Maybe Friedkin was the driving force behind it, and therefore profoundly upset when it didn’t meet his expectations? Could his murder be a delayed act of revenge?

  I swivel my chair around and tap my fingers on the armrest. I notice for the first time that the thing is made of fiberglass, like the seat on an amusement park rollercoaster, not actually of metal. Sheesh, this whole thing is a sham.

  “I think we got the whole code,” says Gerald as the screen goes blank.

  “Well?” I ask, expecting something to happen.

  He starts typing on his laptop. “It’s not like an HTML file where they put everything in a header for you to read.”

  “Oh. I was hoping for a copyright or something. You, know, Evil Computers Incorporated, and their home office address.”

  “That would be convenient,” says Jennifer. “Unfortunately, code like this often leaves documentation out because they’re really limited by storage space. One photo on your phone takes up more memory than this whole system. The instructions are only in the manuals.”

  On our first visit, we’d found a cabinet that seemed like a good candidate for manual storage, but all we discovered was dust.

  “So what are you hoping to find?”

  “Code sections that we can trace to other projects,” she explains. “Like a recognizable database structure, but with alterations. That might tell us who was contracted to make it. If the company is still around, they might still have billing records even if they don’t know who they really built it for. Heck, Bill Gates could have made this for all we know. They certainly weren’t stingy with money.”

  While they focus on the ones and zeroes, I turn my attention to the room itself. The space-age décor really is something else. It feels like a movie set—which makes me think. I take out my phone to see if I can at least send an SMS text message down here.

  Grandfather replies almost immediately. The old guy sure has caught on to technology. Maybe faster than I have. I text back and forth with him while Gerald and Jennifer dig through the lines of code.

  “I found a code block that matches up with something from a code repository,” Jennifer calls out in what could be, for her, excitement.

  Gerald leans over to see her screen. “What am I looking at?”

  She indicates some Martian characters. “I was seeing how they did image handling. Back then the only people who could handle really large photo files were spy agencies. There
were a few proprietary image formats. I found a code library for making thumbnails customized to the limitations of the database. The same method was used in a system for a JPL probe launched in the seventies.”

  “Can you get me a list of the software engineers?” asks Gerald.

  “Sure. What do you got?”

  “I’ve actually been doing some patent searches on multimedia servers from that period. I’d bet anything that whoever made this wanted to protect it.”

  They type away on their computers, trying to connect the code to something outside the secretive world of government black projects. A few minutes later I get a text from my grandfather at the exact same moment Gerald speaks.

  “Found something!” he says.

  “Desert Sun Consulting?” I ask.

  He turns toward me, his mouth open. “Yeah . . . How?”

  I do my best to hide my delight. I tap the chair. “I was thinking they spent a lot of money on this. I was also thinking it felt familiar, like a movie set. If you had a ton of cash and you wanted to build something that looked like the bridge of the Enterprise, who do you go to?”

  “NASA?” asks Jennifer.

  “No. Hollywood. I asked my grandfather if he knew the set builder for the first Star Trek movie. Turns out I’ve even met him. He’d built some magic props that ended up getting us tied in with the mob. It’s a long story. Anyway, I had my grandfather ask him if he’s ever made anything for a movie that never got made, or for a group he never heard from again. He’s done lots of industrial work too, and remembers making something that sounds somewhat like this for a Virginia company.”

  “Desert Sun Consulting,” Gerald replies.

  “Yep.”

  Jennifer looks up from a keyboard. “I can’t find anything about them after nineteen eighty-nine. Maybe we can look for articles of incorporation?”

  “I have another suggestion,” I reply, looking at my phone. “It turns out two sets were made. One was sent here. Another elsewhere.”

  “Two?” she says, glancing around the room. “There’s another?”

  “Yes. This may have been the prototype. The other was sent to Colorado.”

  “Same as the fake driver’s licenses,” Gerald replies.

  “Exactly.”

  “Where?” Jennifer asks.

  I do a quick Google search. “Some town called, Moffat. In the middle of nowhere.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Me neither, it’s barely on the map.”

  Chapter Forty

  Whirlwind

  “I’d been waiting for your call,” says Sheriff Boyer as he greets Nadine and me at the bottom of the staircase leading down from the FBI jet. An olive-skinned man with a thick black mustache, he wears a cowboy hat and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. I hope some things never change in the West.

  “Sheriff, I’m Jessica Blackwood, and this is Nadine Cox,” I say, shaking his hand.

  We’d left the airfield near Quantico early this morning and flown directly to this small airstrip, miles from anywhere, as soon as we heard about Moffat. Even after Ailes and I talked to Boyer on the phone, we still could not wrap our heads around the extraordinary connection between Peter Devon and the bizarre story of what happened in—or to—Moffat.

  Nadine and I managed a few hours of sleep on the plane, but I still have trouble stifling my yawn. The hangars and small control tower that make up the airport are surrounded by thousands of acres of grazing land. The Rockies form a bluish gray wall in the distance.

  Boyer introduces us to the man standing next to him. “This is Deputy Eric Cranston. It was his mother-in-law who noticed Moffat was missing.”

  Cranston is in his early thirties, and his tanned face is shaded by his sheriff department baseball cap. He’s got a military demeanor about him. “Missing?”

  “I tried to tell you on the phone,” says Boyer. “Gone. I can take you to a car rental, or straight to Moffat. It’s about an hour from here.”

  I have to know what the hell is going on. “Let’s go to where Moffat was.”

  Sheriff Boyer leads us to his SUV, which is parked on the edge of the tarmac. Deputy Cranston gives me the front passenger seat and climbs into the back with Nadine.

  As he drives, Boyer fills us in on how they found out about the Moffat “situation.”

  “Olivia, Eric’s mother-in-law, called in with the strangest thing. As you can guess, we didn’t know what to make of it. Moffat is in an unincorporated part of our county. We’ve got a few different communities that like to keep to themselves. Fundamentalists and the like. We took it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and spoke with your Denver office. It was a big deal for a hot minute, then all the trouble broke out in DC and elsewhere. We’ve been dealing with our own riots in Denver and Boulder. Anyway, we sent a forensics team. The truth is people think it’s kind of a joke. A few of these towns are trailer parks. Folks seem to believe they just drove off.”

  “What do you think?”

  Boyer shrugs. “Eric knows the area better than me. It’s a big county.”

  “Moffat wasn’t a trailer park,” says Cranston. “I mean, some of it was. But they had half a dozen real buildings. They’re just gone.”

  “What did your forensics team find out?” Nadine asks.

  “The only thing left is the road. It’s like everything from the ground up just vanished.”

  “We didn’t even know about Moffat until last night. Not even a blip on the news,” says Nadine.

  “Like I said, even people here think it’s some kind of joke.”

  “I can see why,” I point out. “The alternative is terrifying. Is anybody missing?”

  “Other than the fifty-eight people who lived there?” Cranston says drily.

  I quickly try to explain myself. “I mean, have there been any missing persons reports? Do you have names? We couldn’t find any in the FBI database.”

  “These people are off the grid for the most part. Mail delivery was once or twice a week. The only person anybody is missing that we know personally is their regular mail carrier, Charles Pastorali. The only reason we know Moffat itself is missing is because Olivia had to do his route.”

  “So it could have gone away sometime before Olivia appeared?” I’m trying to find a satisfactory explanation for what sounds just bat-shit crazy.

  “I don’t know,” replies Cranston. “Same day Olivia found it, or rather couldn’t, I had a truck driver get lost trying to make a delivery. I’m sure we would have heard something from somebody in the last few days if it had already vanished.”

  “So it happened overnight?” I ask incredulously.

  He stares ahead at the road and shrugs. “Maybe.”

  Nadine and I spend the rest of the ride to Moffat trying to get as much information as we can about its inhabitants from Sheriff Boyer. He’d started digging into the town history after the disappearance, but doesn’t have a whole lot to show for it. Still, it’s more than what I knew.

  “About fifty years ago, a preacher with a group called the Sons of Christ started buying up buildings in town. They started the trailer park,” he explains.

  “Was it only men?” Nadine asks.

  “No. It was just a name. Maybe twenty or thirty people. They’d been living out there, keeping themselves pretty isolated. Then, about twenty years ago, younger people started moving in from out of state. Apparently, there was some kind of changeup. The Sons of Christ sign was taken down from the church. There was no more mention of that.”

  Nadine leans forward with her own questions. “What about the new people? What were they like?”

  “Olivia could tell you better than I can. Some of them seemed like hippies. We get a lot of them out here now. They leave California to come here.”

  “Was it another religious group?” I ask, trying not to let my anxiety get the better of me.

  “I don’t know. I mean, is being a vegan a religion?” he asks earnestly.

  “Depends on w
ho you ask,” I reply.

  “Well, I did hear some reports that they’d drive into Boulder and other places and hand out literature on campuses. Nothing too crazy, as far as I know.”

  “Interesting,” says Nadine. “We have a murder victim who may have been recruited in Grand Junction. We’d love to have a look at your missing persons files.”

  “For anything in particular?”

  I speak up. “Young men and women who are into extreme environmental causes. The more estranged they were from their families, the better. So to speak.”

  “Also the less likely to flag anything,” says Boyer, pointing out how hard they could be to track down.

  “True,” I agree. “We suspect they recruit people based on ideological beliefs and seek out those already estranged from their families. They’re easier to indoctrinate.”

  “You keep saying ‘they,’” Boyer snaps. “Can you tell me who the hell they are supposed to be?” His voice is raised, clearly frustrated from the lack of help from the FBI and other agencies.

  I give it to him bluntly. “They’re a medieval environmentalist death cult trying to enact the apocalypse through a strategy of murder, sabotage, and mass panic.”

  He glances at me for a moment to make sure I’m telling him the truth, then returns his attention to the highway. “Oh . . . I thought we were dealing with something dangerous.”

  “I’m not joking, Sheriff.”

  “I know you aren’t. I see the news. I know how people are acting. None of this surprises me. And when you see what happened to Moffat, you’ll feel the same.”

  I’m afraid I already do.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Gone

  Moffat is gone—gone.

  The gravel road ends and then there is nothing to see but dry dirt and tumbleweed. I only know Moffat is supposed to be here because of my phone’s GPS, and because I believe Boyer and Cranston.

  I get out of the SUV and kick the dirt with my sneaker, hoping that’s all it will take to reveal the lost town. But I just kick up more dirt, covering the black canvas in pale dust.