“Who was supporting him, then?”
“Believe it or not, the Chinese.”
“The Chinese? You’re kidding.”
“Nope. And it makes more sense than it sounds like at first. You already know that relations between the West and China have been deteriorating for years now, what with China’s military buildup and asserting control over the South China Sea. And you’re also aware that China’s been making economic alliances around the world with emerging nations, trying to lock up as many natural resources as possible for their own use. China doesn’t have much by way of raw materials, and with more and more of its people entering the middle class, the government has an enormous problem coming up with the resources and energy it will take to keep them satisfied.
“They’ve also got their problems with the Uighurs and the other domestic Islamic populations they’ve been suppressing for years. Just as Russia does, which, of course, is right next door and also a long-term potential problem for the Chinese.”
“Fine. But I don’t see how connecting all those dots adds up to supporting the Caliphate?”
“It starts to make sense if you think what the world would have looked like if Foobar’s attack had succeeded. The U.S. and Europe would be wiped out, leaving China free to do whatever it wants in Southeast Asia. And there’d be almost no competition for the rest of the world’s resources. Most of the global market for commodities would have evaporated, so they’d all be available to China, and at much lower prices, too.
“That takes us to Russia. It hasn’t moved into cloud computing yet, so the same approach wouldn’t work to take Putin down. But Russia does have a big problem with the Muslim populations it’s been oppressing for decades now. China promised Foobar that after he was in control of as much of Europe and North Africa as he wanted, it would support him in liberating Chechnya and the other Islamic parts of the Russian Federation. That would keep Russia preoccupied for years.
“In exchange, Foobar would reveal and acclaim China’s support, which would make the Chinese government a hero in the eyes of many of its indigenous Muslim citizens.”
“But still—supporting someone trying to kill a billion people? I can’t imagine the government of any country, except maybe North Korea, taking a chance on a stunt like that.”
“And you’d be right. But it might not stop some bigshots in the Chinese military willing to roll the dice. As you may know, the armed forces in China control all kinds of powerful businesses. A lot of generals are closer to being commercial oligarchs than military professionals. And they also control huge sums of money they can move around the world without worrying about the kinds of controls that would apply in most other countries. At any rate, a few of the top generals decided it would be a bright idea to back the Caliphate’s scheme and then reap the global profits. Whether the party bosses were aware and just looked the other way is something we may never know.”
“Wow. That’s quite a story. How come we haven’t gone public with it?”
“Let’s just say that there are a lot of very high-level discussions going on behind the scenes between our diplomats and China’s. Our military is still vastly superior to theirs, but neither side wants a shooting war. We and our NATO allies are pushing for a treaty that settles all kinds of issues, failing which the Western nations will cut off all trade with China. That will be tough for the West, but even tougher for China. It would totally tank their economy, and lead to all kinds of internal shortages. We’ll have to wait and see how that comes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Foobar has been tucked away for safe keeping, and can be brought out at any time to bear witness where his funding and support were coming from.”
“Amazing. It never occurred to me that there was more there than met the eye. What was readily visible was incredible enough.”
“What about the cloud computing legislation?” Tim asked. “Do you think the administration will hold firm against the industry on that?”
“I expect so. In fact, the cloud computing vendors are pretty much at the mercy of the administration now, as the public is never going to tolerate big, aboveground data centers again. The administration was pretty smart to bait the hook with that loan fund and all the tax relief, so the big, diversified companies like Orinoco will come out just fine. Tough luck for WeBCloud, though. Apparently, they owned a lot of patents, but once the president killed the law that would have incorporated the DCSA, most of the value in those patents evaporated. With the whole cloud computing business on hold now, the financing round WeBCloud was relying on to survive collapsed, and so did the company. You probably saw they declared bankruptcy the day after the president’s speech. The last I heard, the highest bid they’re likely to get for the entire company will be less than pennies on the dollars they owe their creditors. So WeBCloud stock is totally worthless.
“So that’s about it,” George concluded. “Anything else? No? Then I guess I’ll get back to my own office.”
Frank accompanied George back to the street, musing to himself as he rode down the elevator that it had been less than three months ago that he had entered the building for the first time. So much had happened so quickly, and now he was right back where he was then.
He blinked twice when that thought struck him. Right back where he was then. As they walked across the lobby, he stopped and turned to George.
“Uh, George, you wouldn’t happen to have anything else you need help with, would you?”
* * *
Epilogue
A familiar voice from long ago interrupted his thoughts. “Hello, Frank.”
He turned around. “Hello, Clare.” He’d already studied her from a distance earlier; she looked younger than he had expected. She still did now that they were face to face. He hoped he looked as good in his new suit as she did in her blue dress and that he had not been fidgeting when she noticed him and came his way.
“I thought you looked very handsome up there, next to Marla,” Clare said. “It made me happy to see the two of you together that way.”
“Did you cry?”
“Of course. Did you?”
“A little, yes.”
“That’s as it should be. No matter how good the groom, it’s hard to give your only daughter to him.”
“Especially…”
“I know. But I think they’re going to do just fine. They’re a lot more mature than you and I were, and older, too. You’ve been a fine father to her, Frank. I hope you know that. She thinks the world of you. Did you know you’re her hero?”
He found himself unsuccessfully waging a war not to blush. “Ah, I haven’t had a drink yet. Would you like one?”
“What a good idea.”
They walked toward one of the bars set up on the broad lawn by the golf course clubhouse.
“Marla tells me you’re married now. Is he here?”
“Of course, he is; what a question! He’s over there, chatting up one of his big clients.” She gestured toward a man in his mid-fifties, holding a drink in one hand and clapping someone on the back with the other. Frank frowned slightly, trying to form an impression of what type of person he might be.
“So I thought I’d hunt you up,” Clare continued. “Marla tells me that you’ve been seeing an elegant professor from Paris.”
“I’m afraid that didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry. I also hear you’re a cyber detective now. Is that interesting?”
“Sometimes.” Time to try to change the conversation once again. He nodded toward another bar. “Look—don’t they look great together?”
Marla and Tim were surrounded by friends, and he had his arm around her waist. Everyone was laughing at something he had just said. Frank felt his throat tightening and surprised himself with the next words out of his mouth.
“Do you think we were ever that happy together, Cl
are?”
She touched his arm. “Of course, we were. All the time for the first couple of years. Don’t you remember?”
“I’m afraid I’ve never been as successful at remembering the good times as the bad.”
“Well, you’ll just have to believe me then.” She paused. “You know, Frank, I only—”
“Did what you had to do for you and Marla.” He was finding it even harder to talk now but pushed on. “I couldn’t accept it at the time, but you were right. You and Marla deserved better.”
“That’s not the way I would ever phrase it, Frank. But I’m glad that you’re able to understand it now. The important thing is that it looks like everything worked out for Marla.”
“And for you?”
“I don’t know. You know I didn’t want to leave you. I just didn’t think I had a choice.”
He cleared his throat. “So do you think you’ve found the right person to spend the rest of your life with this time?”
“Yes, I really do.”
“Then I’m very happy for you. Really.”
“And you?”
“Not yet.”
“I hope you do, Frank. Really.”
Frank realized to his surprise that he was feeling nothing but happiness and pride as he stood there with Clare, watching Marla and Tim laughing with their friends. He felt a sudden sense of relief wash over him, and he felt as if a virtual version of himself had indeed somehow stepped off of a spaceship, merging back into him and wiping clean the slate of tortured emotions that had tormented him ever since he’d last seen Clare. He had passed the test.
He took a deep breath and recklessly took her hand as they watched their only daughter and their new son-in-law.
“Well, who knows about the future,” he said at last. “That will just have to take care of itself. But I think I finally understand something now about the past. And for today, that’s enough.”
* * *
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The Doodlebug War?
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a Tale of Treachery and Technology,
and The Lafayette Campaign,
a Tale of Deception and Elections,
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to express my gratitude to the many individuals who generously assisted me in completing this book.
First off, my thanks to Nora, may daughter and alpha reader. She provided many good suggestions to improve the plot, characters and flow of the book, as well as welcome encouragement along the way.
I’d also like to thank Sayeh Hassan, a Canadian attorney and human rights activist. Sayeh kindly agreed to review the book from a Middle Eastern cultural and religious perspective to ensure that I did not inadvertently give cause for offense to anyone through my own ignorance. Similarly, my thanks go to cybersecurity expert Ralph Rodriquez, who once
again reviewed the text to confirm that everything I’ve written on the
cybersecurity front is technically accurate and could indeed happen in the
way I have written it. I’m also indebted to my brother-in-law, U.S. Navy
Captain (ret.) Thomas Dee, who reviewed the book for military operational
accuracy and made many helpful corrections and suggestions.
I am very grateful to the following faithful friends of Frank, each of whom volunteered to be a beta reader of my near-final draft: Sylva Fae, Eric Lahti, William Lupton, Robert Minchin, Steve Oksala, Andrew Oliver, Frank Parker, Rob van Son, and my brother Steve. As always, they provided invaluable assistance by spotting the inconsistencies, improbabilities and other species of gremlins that an author becomes too blind to see in his own text after seven drafts.
On the production side, I am delighted to have made the acquaintance of Nelly Hartigan, who lent an eagle-eye and encyclopedic editing knowledge to the finalization of the text of this book. And once again, I’ve benefited from the excellent design skills and generous time and talent of Glendon Haddix, of Streetlight Graphics. As with my previous two books, his fantastic cover and clean interior designs make all the different. I would recommend both of these professionals without hesitation to other authors.
As I’ve noted elsewhere in the past, I’d never let Frank do anything truly stupid that I hadn’t already done myself. Accordingly, my heartfelt thanks once again go to my long suffering bride, Kathy.
And finally, thanks to Frank, who bravely allowed me to share with you his difficult and very personal effort to reconcile himself with a dark period of his past.
THE ALEXANDRIA PROJECT
Prologue
Late In The afternoon of a gray day in December, a panel truck pulled up to the gate of a warehouse complex in a run-down section of Richmond, Virginia. Rolling down his window, Jack Davis punched a code into the control box, and the gate clanked slowly out of the way. Once inside, he wheeled the truck around and backed it up against a loading dock as the gate closed behind him.
After unlocking and raising the loading dock door, Davis threw a light switch, revealing long rows of pallets, each stacked eight feet high with boxes of paper plates, cups and towels. He closed and locked the door, and stamped on the brake release pedal of a hydraulic lifter parked against the wall. Counting to himself, he pushed the lifter along the wall of pallets. When he reached row nineteen, he turned the lifter and maneuvered its long tines under the pallet. Raising it a few inches, he backed up until he could swing the pallet through 180 degrees. Then he pulled it behind him until it was back exactly where it had been before.
Davis had plenty of room to work, because where the pallet in the second row should have been, there was only a large metal plate set in the floor. Near the edge was a small hinged panel, which he unlocked with a key to expose a biometric security pad.
When Davis pressed his thumb against it, he heard a familiar click. Stepping back, he watched as the plate swung slowly upwards, followed by the telescoping ends of a ladder extending up from a deep shaft barely illuminated in red light. Grasping the ladder firmly, Davis descended through twenty feet of reinforced concrete while the door overhead swung silently closed above him. At the bottom, he remembered to don a pair of sunglasses before opening an unlocked door.
As usual, even with this precaution the bright lights in the enormous room beyond nearly blinded him. But soon he could clearly see the endless rows of floor to ceiling metal racks crammed with identical gray boxes. Each box displayed a row of rhythmically blinking lights, and sprouted a bundle of brightly colored wires that ran down into conduits embedded in the floor.
The room hummed purposefully with the sound of thousands of cooling fans, one to a box. Davis felt more than heard the other vibrations that filled the room, generated by the pulse of the thousands of gallons of cooling water that every minute coursed through the collectors lining the walls of the room, absorbing the waste heat that the racks of computer servers threw off. No heat signature would give this facility away from above; once warm, the coolant was directed to the water intake of a nearby power plant, happy to take the pre-heated water from wherever it was that it came from, no questions asked.
Walking along the perimeter of the room, Davis could look down through the open metal grid of the floor at the first of many ad
ditional tiers of computer servers. But that always made him a little dizzy, so instead he looked out for the guard he was relieving. No surprise – there he was, heading Davis’s way, more than happy to call it a day. When they met, the guard stopped to slip on the coveralls he carried over one arm. Like the semi-automatic pistol the guard wore in a shoulder holster, they were identical to those that Davis also wore.
“What’s the weather like?”
“Sucks. Sleet and more of the same predicted till morning.”
“Figures. Tomorrow’s my day off.”
With that, the other man was on his way. In a few minutes he would drive off in the truck Davis had parked outside.
Well, the weather won’t be bothering me in here, Davis thought. The room was climate controlled to within a tenth of a degree of a chilly 54 degrees Fahrenheit, and well-insulated by the bomb-proof walls and roof installed above. It had taken two years for a fleet of delivery vans to carry all the dirt and rock away that had been excavated from beneath the warehouse. The same vans had returned with cement, steel, and, eventually, those thousands of servers, accompanied by technicians to set them up. The process had been tedious, yes, but not a single satellite picture had ever shown a trace of the ambitious construction project proceeding underground.
Of course, the effect worked in both directions. With no links to the outside world other than a voice line to his supervisor, the whole bloody world could come to an end and Davis would be none the wiser until after his shift was over.
Davis walked up a flight of steel stairs to the bullet proof, glass-walled security booth attached to the wall overlooking the room. His major challenge for the next twelve hours would be to stand watch in that booth without falling asleep. There’d be hell to pay if he did, because another guard, in another security room far away, would be watching him on a video screen.
The Doodlebug War: a Tale of Fanatics and Romantics (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 3) Page 28
