Not So Dead: A Sam Sunborn Novel

by Charles Levin

  “I know, I know. I was just hoping against hope that our work would not all be lost or turn to chaos.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a total loss if we can strike a deal with the right people with juice,” he said.

  “Really…like who?” I said doubtfully.

  “When I was working with the DOD, there was a big macher from Homeland Security named Rich Little on the team who seemed to be calling a lot of the shots. I like him and I think we can trust him. I checked him out and he’s got connections that go all the way to the top. And by the ‘top,’ I mean the president. They went to Harvard together and knew each other there. Rich works out of the DHS office downtown. You’ll have to contact him because he thinks I’m dead, which, I guess technically I am.” Frank smiled. We all smiled grim smiles along with him. “You can use my name to get in. Mention Project Magic Window and you should be able to get his attention. Go see him in person. Do not discuss any details on the phone or online. Also, make sure you are alone and in a secure room when you meet. Do it today, like right now.”

  I pondered all the instructions and whether I could really pull this off. “So let’s say I get to meet with him, how much should I tell him and what’s the deal?”

  “Sam, I have confidence in you to do the right thing. Isn’t that what we agreed to when we started our work together? Now go and do it, partner.”

  CHAPTER 24

  HOMELAND SECURITY

  I knew it might be one of the strangest meetings of my life. I checked my watch. It was already 4:00, getting late. I had asked Al to join me, since she might understand security-speak. Ironically, DHS was located on the thirteenth floor of the Google building.

  “Do you remember Rich Little, the impressionist?” I asked Al as we rode up the elevator.

  “Sure, he was great. I loved his James Cagney,” Al said.

  “Funny, I don’t think anybody in my office is old enough to remember either of them. Too bad, they really missed something,” I mused.

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened into a small lobby. There was a receptionist behind a mahogany desk with a headset on, answering calls. Behind her was a large glass wall with the Department of Homeland Security seal. The font looked very Federal, which made me smile. There was a white eagle in the center with a breast shield representing air, land and sea. Some things just fit their persona.

  The receptionist finally seemed to get a break from her calls and looked up at us expectantly. “How can I help you?”

  “We’re here to see Rich Little. I’m Sam Sunborn and this is Detective Al Favor. He should be expecting us.”

  I noticed her typing, not speaking her query. “He’ll be out to greet you in a few minutes. Please take a seat.”

  There were two white leather chairs and a sofa facing each other in the lobby. They had the smell of new leather, like a new car. Why does that scent smell so good? I put down my briefcase and walked around browsing pictures of DHS Headquarters, commendations and a letter from the former president. I always liked to scan the walls in lobbies of prospective clients when I used to visit. It usually gave me a feel for the place and the personality of the business. I read the former president’s letter.

  Dear Director Little,

  I want to congratulate you for your appointment as Regional DHS Director. You have earned this important position as a result of your hard work and service on behalf of the security of the American people.

  I ask you and your team to work your hardest to continue to prevent and counteract all threats present and future that threaten our safety, security and the American way of life. You should know that I and the full resources of the US government stand behind you to accomplish this goal.

  We must never rest. We must never assume. We must always be vigilant.

  A grateful nation thanks you for your service.

  Sincerely,

  Albert J. Conklin, President of the United States of America

  The letter also had the impressive Presidential Seal. I realized in a way that I had been selfish and self-centered in my work on Digital3000. That there were bigger things to consider and my focus had been too narrow. We probably should have come forward sooner, but sometimes you don’t do things until you’re forced to do them.

  Just then I heard a buzz and the glass doors behind the receptionist opened. A man, who looked in his mid-thirties, in a fitted gray suit, white shirt and red power tie, came through the doors. His slicked-back hair and prominent part said classic FBI. He held the door open and said, “Welcome, follow me. I’m Rich Little. You must be Mr. Sunborn and Detective Favor.” We shook hands as we walked.

  “Sam and Al, please,” I said as Rich walked us quickly down the hall to a small conference room. The faint odor of Windex lingered in the air.

  We sat around a small round table that only had a silver water pitcher and four glasses. “You mentioned a name and a project that got my attention Sam. What can I do for you?” Rich was getting right down to business. I liked that.

  “Is this room secure?” I asked, remembering Frank’s warning.

  “Yes, it is—swept twice a day. You’re at DHS. What did you expect?” Rich smiled.

  I couldn’t help myself. “I have a story to tell you, but before we start, I have to ask. Any relationship to the famous impressionist?”

  “Yes, he was actually my grandfather. I was named after him. He was a wonderful, talented man.”

  “Maybe when we have more time and less pressing business, you can tell us more,” I continued. It took me about twenty minutes, but I brought Rich up to speed about everything we knew from our technology to Frank’s murder to the current threat that brought us here. I finished.

  Rich had sat silently through my whole narration but took notes on a yellow legal pad. Now he stayed silent with one hand over his mouth and slightly slouched in his chair. “That’s quite a story,” he said. “Why did you come to me?”

  “We needed someone we could trust—both to take us seriously and also to work with us. We want to help neutralize the threat without losing our technology and intellectual property.” There I said it plain and simple.

  “Hmm. So you want to have your cake and eat it too,” he said with a smirk.

  “No, actually, we want to share the cake and keep the bad guys from smashing it up first,” I insisted.

  “This is not a decision I can make on my own, and I should verify what you have told me. Frank is, or I should say was, an old friend. I believe you guys, but we’re talking about a serious mobilization on our part,” Rich said without too much conviction. He seemed to be fighting some internal battle.

  “Our information points to a major event today. So we don’t have much time,” I pleaded.

  “You guys stay here. I’m going to make some calls. I’ll be back in less than thirty.” Rich continued surprisingly in a James Cagney voice impression, “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.” I recognized the line from Yankee Doodle Dandy. Hopefully this crisis wasn’t going to turn into White Heat. He left the room quickly.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE DAY OF BATTLE

  The unmarked G5 jet pulled up to a private terminal at the far end of San Francisco International. The Leopard preferred private air travel because it was relatively untraceable and he didn’t have to go through security. He would also admit to himself that he enjoyed the pure luxury of it. The leather seats, the food and the attractive stewardess. Whatever. He had to see to it personally that the cockroach that Viktor failed to squash would be stopped. The plan was too important for some stupid American geek to upset it. Sometimes you just had to take care of things yourself, he thought again. He smiled as he thought about Eskabar’s demonstration and what it meant for him and his country. Like 9/11, we would be able to turn American assets into deadly weapons against themselves. How sweet the irony.

  A black SUV pulled up to the stairs running down from the G5. LaSalam slipped inside. “Where to
?” the driver said in Farsi.

  “English please. We must not break cover. Take me to the Gorge.”

  CHAPTER 26

  END RUN

  The next day, I returned to the office to see Bart and his fellow warriors hunched around one screen.

  “They killed Frank again,” Bart said.

  I was startled. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean that they’ve literally killed him, but they are clearly attacking several instances of him across the Internet,” Bart said. “Somehow they have gotten a hold of the Bullrun program developed by the NSA or they have figured out how to do it themselves, but they have broken our 256 bit encryption that protects Frank and all the other uploaded personalities.”

  “Looks like we have a serious security problem.”

  “You bet we do. We can’t just protect Frank by keeping him offline in the Zelda environment. Frank needs to be able to move freely on the Internet in order to live. The guys and I have been working on an incredible security program that would give us two gigabyte encryption to protect Frank and the rest of us online. That’s 1000 times more powerful than anything that exists right now. If Digital3000 fails, we could always make a fortune in the online security business, ha ha.”

  “Not funny,” I said. It seemed like we were being attacked on all fronts. “How much time?”

  “Killer and I will have a workable beta version in an hour. I don’t think we have time for testing.”

  “Neither do I. There’s never enough time for testing.” I smirked knowingly. It seemed almost every project we ever did was up against a deadline, and clients never understood the need for testing. But this time it wasn’t about selling Farting Slippers (yes we built a site that sold them along with the Toilet Monster and other “necessities”). This time it was truly a life-or-death deadline.

  Bart smirked back. We silently knew what the other guy was thinking. We had a lot of history together. “OK, OK—let me get back to it. Hey, any word from DHS Little?”

  “He’s not promising anything. He’s running it up the chain. We may have to act on our own, and if they show up, great. If not, we may die trying.” This time there were no smirks. “Where are our guns?”

  CHAPTER 27

  CONFERENCE

  Rich Little sat at the conference table tapping his pen nervously on the glass table top. He was on his third cup of black coffee. The clicking sound did not calm him. He glanced up at the fifty-two inch OLED screen on the far wall. The image was static. It was a blue background with the Presidential Seal just sitting there.

  He knew President Longford was hands-on. He only knew her by sight, as an acquaintance, when they attended Harvard at the same time. He had not been involved in such a potential crisis since 9/11. It was on account of 9/11 that he had this job or in fact that there was even a Department of Homeland Security. Little sometimes wondered if we even needed a DHS with the other sixteen US Intelligence Agencies that operated in the US and around the world. Today I might answer that question, he thought.

  The screen flickered to life and a young woman that looked familiar appeared wearing a headset. “Please standby for the president.”

  “DHS Little, it’s good to see you again, but not under these unfortunate circumstances. I have Hager from Defense, Osborne from CIA and Kennedy from State here. Let’s get to it,” the president said after the brief intros.

  “Madame President, have you been briefed on the threat?” Little said.

  “Yes, but I’d like your assessment plus any important details or updates you have,” she said.

  Little cleared his throat and took another sip of coffee. “I have done a thorough background check on Sunborn, and I have fifteen agents on the ground sniffing for traces of the Leopard. As wild as Sunborn’s story sounds, it checks out. I also have reason to believe LaSalam is in this country. Further, we think the attack they have planned is being managed from a control center inside the US. LaSalam probably knows about the Piper Protocol.”

  Hager jumped in because Longford was pretty new to the job. “The Piper Protocol allows you, Madame President, to give an order to shut down all Internet and phone communications going into and out of the US. It would be a last ditch failsafe to protect us from an external cyber attack.”

  “I have been briefed on that. Rich, please continue.”

  “I believe that’s why the Leopard set up a domestic control center. It would be pretty hard, even in an emergency, to shut down all domestic Internet and phone communications. We also suspect he is running his own private network via a private satellite uplink.”

  “Wait, how is that possible?” she asked.

  Osborne jumped in. After all, if you had nothing to contribute, why would you be in the meeting, he thought. “LaSalam, or well-funded terrorists like him, could rent bandwidth on a foreign satellite and use sat phones to carry their signals. Ever since the NSA’s global snooping powers were revealed, our enemies have been setting up private networks beyond our reach.”

  “OK, so what do you all recommend?” Longford said.

  “Are you all aware of the Cyber Warrior Project code named Magic Window?” Little asked with some hesitation.

  Longford and Osborne looked at each other with quizzical expressions on their faces. Hager squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. Little continued, “I was not aware of it either until Sunborn filled me in with what he knew from his partner Frank Einstein’s experimental project. The goal of the project was to see if we could actually upload specially equipped soldiers to the Internet to carry out both overt and covert operations for us. It is in a very early-stage. That’s why Secretary Hager probably did not fill you all in. They wanted some tangible results or at least a proof-of-concept before they got too excited or let the cat out of the bag.”

  Longford was visibly annoyed. “I wouldn’t call keeping the president informed, ‘Letting the cat out of the bag.’ I wonder how many other little ‘experimental’ projects like this are going on that neither George nor I are aware of? Ok, well that may be a serious discussion for another time. Rich, we interrupted you. Continue.”

  Little waited a few seconds for the tension to clear. The coffee was starting to burn a hole in his stomach. “Let me back up. We have two threats or maybe I should say, a two-pronged threat. One prong is physical—the crashing of our airplanes and the ensuing death and destruction. The other is digital—the compromising of our communications infrastructure and the ensuing panic, financial collapse, etc.” He couldn’t believe he was saying these things to the President of the United States, but he was committed now. So he might as well go all the way. “We need to look at both preventive and contingent actions for both scenarios. Chunk it down and attack each one.”

  There was silence as everyone mulled the enormity of what they faced.

  Here goes, he thought. “We could ground all air traffic, like we did after 9/11, but they could just wait us out and launch their attack a week, two weeks or a month from now to the same disastrous effect. So it seems to me the number one priority is to find their US control center and shut that down.”

  Hager piped up. “If we do find it and shut it down, what keeps them from launching remotely or from a backup control center?”

  Little was prepared for this one. “If, and that’s a big ‘if,’ we find their primary control, we should find clues or trails to their other control centers.

  “Second, NSA has some intercepts that indicate the Leopard is in the country now. Cut off the head and maybe the snake dies—at least for now.” Little felt a bit like John Wayne or John Malkovich. He wasn’t sure which.

  “OK, that makes sense. Any leads on finding either the control center or LaSalam?” Osborne asked.

  Little was ready for that one too. “We have a civilian who has been pretty helpful getting us this far and I think –”

  “A civilian?” Hager said turning red in the face. “Seventeen goddam spy agencies and the most powerful military in the world and
our national security hinges on a civilian?” There was actually mucus dripping from his nose, and his face was alternating from red to white like a beacon.

  Longford interrupted. “Chuck, calm down and let Director Little finish. This is no time for bluster or puffed up egos.” Nothing like a smart woman to put the brakes on male ego out-of-control.

  Little took the cue. “This civilian who I mentioned earlier is named Sam Sunborn. He founded Digital3000 with Frank Einstein, one of the former top scientists in the Cyber Warrior Project.”

  “Former?” Hager asked, calmer now.

  “Einstein was taken out in a hit on Digital3000’s headquarters about six months ago. He has since been digitized and uploaded using Sunborn’s proprietary software.”

  “How come we didn’t hear anything about this before now?” Longford asked.

  Now Osborne had to step in or his ass would be grass. “We decided, for national security reasons, to bury the story. We have been actively trying to track down the killers. We think it links back to Barin and their Cyber Warfare division, but now I’m thinking maybe the Leopard had a hand in this too.”

  “Let’s focus here. Director Little, continue.”

  “Sunborn and his team are actually more advanced in digitizing people and personalities than we are. He has offered his help in deploying Einstein and their online group to track both the control center and LaSalam.”

  “I thought you said Einstein was dead.”

  “He is, but he is alive online and he has been trolling the web for clues.”

  “OK. That sounds like part of a plan,” Longford said as if thinking out loud. “But I never like putting all my eggs in one basket—civilian, military or otherwise. What else have we got? Is there some way to shut down their satellite network and communications?”

  Now Hager perked up like he might have something constructive to add. “We think we may be able to identify the satellites they are using. Defense Intelligence has every piece of orbiting hardware mapped.”