by S L Shelton
The President smiled. “Good. Thank you, Mike. I know you bust your butt for me.”
“We try, sir.”
“You headed home for the night?” The President asked picking up the book he had been reading. Casey grinned at the title; The Radiation Chemistry of Polysaccharides. What a nerd, he thought. “Yes, sir. First home-cooked meal in five days.”
“Good, good. Say hi to Julia for me.”
Casey smiled broadly. “I will, sir. Thank you.”
He left the patio through the dining room, back into the West Wing, but not before he caught sight of the chief of staff staring at him with a smug grin through the window of the oval office. He ignored the glare and walked through the western exit toward the staff parking lot. As he got to his car, he had a panicked thought. What if Director Burgess had been right about infiltration at Homeland.
Casey turned the thought over in his head as he slipped the key into the ignition. Homeland Security had stuck by and even run interference for Baynebridge, long after any reasonable agency had severed ties.
He started the engine and sat there as his car radio came on.
“—greater security since the horrific explosion at CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia in February,” the reporter said. “Though a few officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they suspect inside efforts to undermine the intelligence community, the FBI, Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and the new Director of the CIA have been united in batting down such speculation. The official position has been, that despite appearances, the explosion resulted from a crumbling infrastructure issue, and the official investigation revealed aging plastic gas lines embedded in the lower levels are to blame for the devastating destruction that took the life of the former Director, Matthew Burgess, and close to fifty other CIA employees.”
Casey wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. His job had always been to look for immediate, imminent threats. Sharp eyes, intuition, and tactical discernment were his professional tools, and he had no desire to hunt the halls of the political world for future threats—but this was troubling. Too many coincidences, and now Homeland Security was providing outside sourcing for his protection detail.
“The close association between the now famous TravTech and the CIA came out after that building was also leveled in a February 15th terrorist attack, killing more than a hundred and seventy-five employees and contractors. The attack, perpetrated by a Syrian immigrant, Fariq Shahid, seems to have been committed under duress after the investigation showed his home had been invaded and his wife and daughter were later found executed in a neighboring county.
“Justice Department officials have said it might be impossible to find the true motivation for Shahid’s actions as no note or message was left prior to the attack.
“A former employee of TravTech who was recruited by the CIA, Scott Lawson Wolfe, is now wanted by the FBI for his involvement in the use of official resources to steal millions of dollars from US and European business interests in the Cayman Islands. Asked if there was any connection between Wolfe and the terrorist attack, the Justice Department replied, ‘it’s too early to make that determination’.”
Casey had been on duty the night Scott Wolfe arrived at the Pentagon helo pad after the attack at the Farm. In fact, he’d been standing in the hallway at the White House when Director Burgess had sworn him in as a CIA Officer. They’d called Wolfe a hero—the president had shaken his hand. And now everyone involved in that was dead or on the most wanted list, including the SEALs who had evacuated the survivors.
SEALs! DevGru—the most vetted members of the military… traitors?! The whole thing felt like a conspiracy, from top to bottom.
“Bullshit.” Casey shook his head and shifted his car into gear. “Too damned many coincidences.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed as he reached the gate.
“Secret Service, West Wing,” came the reply.
“Cammy, it’s Mike Casey.”
“Hey, boss. What’s up… Didn’t you just leave?”
“Yeah. Hey. Do me a favor,” he said as he drove onto Pennsylvania Avenue. “We’re going to have new faces showing up for placement in the schedule in the morning.”
“Yeah, the Homeland Security additions. The chief of staff just briefed me on it.”
Casey clenched his jaw, his anger bubbling to the surface. “Have you started working them into the schedule yet?”
“Just started.”
Casey grimaced and bit the corner of his lip. “Make sure you have two of our guys for every one of them that goes on a protection detail.”
“Okay,” Cammy said, sounding confused, drawing the single word out like a litany of questions.
“It’s probably nothing, but until we get our division clearances done on them, I want our guys at the top of the key.”
“The chief of staff told me to cancel the clearances…that Homeland had already cleared them. I have their files right here.”
Casey’s hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Well, the chief of staff obviously hasn’t put that past POTUS. I just talked to him and he said we could finish the clearances even with them in place.”
“You’re the boss, boss.”
“And one more thing…keep it on the down low.”
There was a momentary silence on the line before Cammy responded. “Is there something going on I need to know about?”
“Maybe…I don’t know,” Casey said, drumming his fingers on his steering wheel. “Probably not. I just have a tingle at the back of my neck.”
“We’ve all learned to trust that tingle over the years,” she replied. “I’ll keep it on the DL.”
“Thanks, Cam. Call me if anything weird happens, no matter how small.”
“I will boss. Have a good night. Say hi to Julia for me.”
“I will. Good night.”
As Sunday afternoon traffic crept out of DC, he wondered if he should go back and personally take the clearances for the new guys. He sighed in resignation and shook his head, troubled. He’d already included Cammy in his minor mutiny—no plausible deniability for her.
He slapped his steering wheel in frustration. “What the hell is going on?!”
nine
Monday, May 2nd
7:15 a.m.—Rebel Team 3 Safe house, Goodway, Alabama
STORY “STORC” CARSON walked to the edge of the woods and stared out across the soybean field. The sun still hadn’t risen above the tree line to the east, but the heat was already suffocating.
He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and then opened the cover on his tablet. He’d been mapping the range of his Wi-Fi connection for the past hour and was ready to head back when he received a notification on his Craigslist message watcher—a single post with an identifier belonging to Jo. He tensed, fearing the worst, then smiled, relaxing upon seeing it was a status update. Good news.
Under Rants and Raves, Los Angeles, Jo posted:
Numberz and Number CombinN8shunz to expose Demonik Attak
1367,11,33,66,77,90215
I can confirm the demonz R real, visible, and detectable. My own experience showz that once the procedurz are in place, there will be amazement before action. They won’t be able to ignore the proof. It will be EPIC.
Storc laughed at her ingenious hidden message. She had successfully isolated the malware fingerprints from foreign enemies and created a program to detect them in storage. She was obviously excited by the possibility of forcing a reboot on the INTEL backup system.
He typed out a response in his script, encrypting and dispersing the message across ten cities and forty postings, unlike Jo’s which was cleverly in the open.
I’ll be watching. Go deep on the proxy path. We don’t want them finding their way back. Go ahead and launch.
After sending the message, he sat on a massive fallen tree at the edge of the wood line and leaned back, closing his eyes. For a moment, he let himself fantasize about the e
nd of this exile—restarting his life with Jo and going back…Shit, he thought. TravTech is gone, Bonbon is dead, and I don’t have a home anymore. There was no going back—there was nothing to go back to.
Grief welled up in his chest, and he felt a hot tear slide down his cheek.
“Hey!”
Storc jumped up, startled. Mark Gaines walked toward him from the wooded trail that obscured their safe house from the road.
“Just testing the Wi-Fi range,” Storc said, wiping his cheek. “We want it strong enough to pick up the wireless security cams but not so strong it can be detected from the road.”
“What did I tell you about wandering off by yourself?”
Storc chewed the corner of his lip, suppressing anger and anxiety. “I just needed some space.”
“You have five people here whose only job is to keep you safe,” Mark replied more gently, though still with an edge. He stopped a few feet away and sat on the tree Storc had been lying on. “We can’t do that if you keep disappearing on us.”
Storc nodded and lowered his head, too tired to argue, fight, or protest.
Mark chuckled and shook his head. “I’m beginning to think you tech types don’t like being told anything… Scott is the same way.”
Storc looked at Mark and could feel fresh heat rise to his face. “You don’t know Scott.”
“I know him pretty well,” he said, laughing and pointing to his crooked nose. Scott had broken it when Mark went solo looking for the people who had killed his sister and her family.
Storc shook his head. “That’s not Scott. I don’t know what you people turned him into, but I’ve known Scott for more than a decade.” He sat, closing the cover on his tablet. “Scott was always creative, out of the box and headstrong, but he was never cold, calculating, or a killer.”
Mark nodded, staring at Storc for a moment with what seemed like sincere reflection on his words. “I don’t know what changed him, but he was born to this work,” he said, his voice conveying genuine admiration. “I’m glad he’s on our side. Because if he weren’t, this would all be over already and we’d all be dead, in prison, or on the run.”
Mark’s sincerity startled Storc. The sentiment disarmed him, making him feel less threatened—until he realized Mark had just manipulated him on an emotional level. He’d stroked Storc’s loyalty by praising Scott. You slimy, deceitful, spy, he thought. Fuck you.
“Thanks,” Storc said. “That helps put things in perspective.”
Mark squinted at him for a second then smiled, rising to his feet. “Come on. Let’s grab some breakfast.”
Storc stood and followed, flipping his tablet open as he went. A notification script chimed its arrival, and he opened the decrypted Craigslist message from Jo.
“Done, and done. Clean proxy chain used and package delivered. Fireworks should begin within the hour. Miss you.”
Storc smiled, though the tension in his chest built. They had just jammed a stick into a hornets’ nest. The confusion it created might keep them from being stung, but if panic didn’t rule the day on enemy programs being revealed in the backup, the hornets would make a beeline for Jo.
Worried, Storc pulled up her proxy chain list and double-checked each remote server—it was twice as long as anything they had used in the past and staged to dissolve if probed. Several of the servers were government servers behind government firewalls. Their malware had made unknowing slaves of the systems, passing on digital poison to others.
“She’s good,” he muttered. “She’s real good.”
Mark looked over his shoulder as they walked toward the house. “What’s that?”
“Nothing…just pulling the trigger on a big move. Jo’s good.”
“You’re all good,” Mark said, turning forward again. “I’m constantly amazed by all of you.”
Storc shook his head, watching the proxy chain loop back and reroute dynamically. Nothing Mark said could be taken at face value. And the SEALs—well, the SEALs seemed more interested in seeing who could take the hardest punch; not exactly Storc’s wheelhouse. He was a computer nerd, stuck in a house with the high school football team and the captain of the lacrosse team.
Could be worse…I could be a pawn in someone else’s game and be surrounded by killers.
He smiled at his ironic thought. It’s a good thing I hold the purse strings on a hundred billion dollars in conspiracy money.
**
10:15 a.m. — The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia
ALBERT EMRICK had just stepped out of a briefing with JSOC commanders when his phone rang. He looked down at his phone to see Roger Gallow was the caller.
He let it ring as he hurried to a quiet corridor to answer.
“Emrick,” he said quietly.
“Albert, it’s Roger…we have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?” Emrick said, his chest suddenly tight.
There was a short pause on the line followed by the sound of electronic alarms. “The kind of problem unique to what we do that shouldn’t be discussed over the phone.”
“On my way,” Emrick replied, running before he’d even ended the call.
Twenty-five minutes later, he pulled through the main gate at GGP Labs. He parked across two spaces and bolted inside, flashing his ID at security and rushing through the metal detector. On the far side of the lobby, a red light flashed above the elevators, a silent indication something had gone wrong.
Judging by the calm and orderly exit of office workers that streamed from the elevators, it didn’t seem as though the emergency was that big a deal.
He waited, impatiently tapping his foot as one elevator car emptied, then pushed through the last three people to get on. He rode up, alone, worrying about the cause of the evacuation.
After stepping out of the elevator on the executive level, the simple flashing lights gave way to alarms sounding throughout the building. The previous calm stream of employees became a sudden flood of panic. Executives streamed out of their offices and headed for the stairwell.
“Where’s Roger Gallow?” Emrick asked a passing woman.
She ignored him and continued to run for the stairs. Instead, he accosted the next man by the arm.
“Where is Gallow?” He asked pulling the man to a halt.
“Lab level,” The man exclaimed excitedly. “There’s been a containment failure. Get out!”
The man pulled away from Emrick's grasp and fled with the others. Emrick climbed back aboard the elevator with six nervous looking executives and office workers. He reached over and pressed the lab level key.
“Are you nuts?” One of the men snapped, then pressed the first-floor key repeatedly as if that action would guarantee a stop on the ground level.
When they reached the main concourse, everyone but Emrick rushed out of the lift. He pushed the door-close button and rode it down to the labs.
Before the doors even opened, he could hear louder alarms and beeping through the walls. Upon opening, chaos filled his sight. Lab technicians were tripping over each other to get to the exits. As soon as they saw the elevator doors open, they began to push toward it.
Emrick barely managed to escape the lift before people began shoving in. He calmly walked along the now sealed corridor in the lab section. He reached the secure section door and saw no guards in place. Looking through the glass, he saw Gallow walking into the decontamination room, followed by others who appeared to be trying to stop him.
The sliding doors slammed shut, separating him from his pursuers and the decontamination mists blasted him so that he vanished in the fog momentarily. Once through, he walked up to the door panel on the opposite side of the glass Emrick was standing on. He reached down and did something to the panel causing the door to slide open. Emrick was stunned, not expecting the seal to be broken.
Tension swelled in Emrick's chest, wondering if he was about to be or had already been contaminated by some virus or bacterium.
“What’s going on?” Emrick asked G
allow angrily.
“There’s been a setback in the program,” Gallow said as he pushed past Emrick and moved toward a freight elevator off to the side of the corridor.
“What kind of ‘setback’?” Emrick asked as Gallow turned a key to open the elevator door.
“I’ll explain on the way up.”
They both entered the elevator.
As soon as the doors closed, Emrick grabbed Gallow by the collar. “Tell me what’s happened.”
He could feel his breath coming in short gasps. His mind constructed all manner of infection coursing through his body. Panic started to blend with his anger, though Gallow seemed unconcerned with the physical confrontation.
“The test samples and the active matrices have been compromised,” Gallow said calmly.
“How!” Emrick yelled, breathing heavily, gasping through a constricting throat.
“The decontamination system was activated in all the storage units,” Gallow replied, his breath seemingly unaffected by the same forces that constricted Emrick’s lungs.
Emrick gasped, shaking Gallow by the collar. “How much have we lost?”
“Everything,” Gallow replied without emotion.
“Everything?!”
“Including the data and research materials,” Gallow added.
“HOW!” Emrick’s mind came to a screeching halt with that new information. He suddenly realized they weren’t dealing with a simple lab accident. This was sabotage.
Emrick shook Gallow violently. “Who’s responsible?!”
“You are.” The elevator came to a halt on the top floor.
“I am?”
Gallow shoved Emrick aside as if he were made of paper, then exited the elevator and walked up the stairs to the roof. Emrick chased after him.
“What do you mean ‘I am’?” Emrick yelled.
“If you hadn’t used the program for your own selfish ends, everything would still be going as planned,” Gallow said over his shoulder. “The program would have been allowed to progress for years and may have eventually led to real innovation. Now, others will have to be responsible for those advances.”
