Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  At the far end of the hall, Grange paused outside a sealed doorway to take two calming breaths. He wouldn’t allow himself to carry any anger or frustration into the chamber that lay beyond that door.

  Placing his palm against the scanner, Grange watched as the door disappeared into a slot in the wall. Cold air flowed out like a river, chilling his legs and feet such that the air around them would have condensed into fog if not for the humidity-controlled environment. Grange stepped forward, hearing the door whisk closed behind him as he approached the horizontally mounted fourteen-by-four-foot metal cylinder that occupied the center of the otherwise empty room.

  Grange moved up beside the stainless steel cylinder that housed the frozen body of the only woman he’d ever loved. Wiping the moisture from his eyes, he leaned down to kiss the smooth metal, feeling his breath carry some of that cold through his lips and into his lungs.

  When Grange lifted his head, the whisper that escaped his lips was barely audible.

  “I miss you, Helen.”

  Grange felt a tear form at the corner of his left eye. As a wan smile creased his lips, he realized that, for the first time in twenty years, this was a tear of expectant joy.

  CHAPTER 11

  Levi Elias glanced at the other person seated at the table in Admiral Riles’s private conference room while they waited for the NSA director’s arrival. Dr. Denise Jennings kept her iron-gray hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wasn’t the NSA’s top computer scientist. Dr. David Kurtz held that honor. But Denise had developed the underpinnings of the massively distributed neural network that she had nicknamed Big John, after the legendary miner in the old Jimmy Dean ballad.

  While it was true that the NSA collected and stored massive amounts of data, much of it at its Utah Data Center, Big John did a different type of data mining, one that didn’t involve data collection at a central location. Denise had been behind the top-secret NSA program that had encouraged the rise of illegal computer hacking groups. It wasn’t their hacking that the NSA was interested in. It was the fear of being hacked that had been created in the general populace.

  That fear drove people to install antivirus software on all of their electronics and, unbeknownst to even the antivirus companies, Denise’s kernel had been embedded in the vast majority of their products. The NSA estimated that those kernels were currently installed on two-thirds of the computational devices on the planet.

  The beauty of this approach was that antivirus software was designed to scan every bit of data on each system as well as network packets that were transmitted to and from the device. As the small patch of neurons that made up Denise’s kernel examined the data on one particular device, it used a special algorithm to categorize it and assign node weights.

  What all this meant was that the actual data didn’t need to be transmitted back to a central collection center. The world was Big John’s data center. And because antivirus applications needed to regularly update themselves with the latest virus signatures, they were expected to send and receive data. Embedded in the data that came in to each device were regular updates to each Big John kernel. And the devices transmitted their accumulated node weights back out.

  As far as Levi was concerned, how Big John used that worldwide neural net to perform the correlative searches for which it had been designed was pure black magic. And Dr. Denise Jennings was the voodoo queen. Considering her periodic verbal wonderings about when Big John might acquire true artificial intelligence, Levi thought the voodoo reference appropriate.

  Neither Levi nor Denise rose to their feet as Admiral Riles entered. Riles had long ago made it quite clear to members of his senior staff that he considered that particular military courtesy a waste of time and didn’t want to be bothered with repeatedly telling them to stay seated. As Riles took his seat at the head of the table, his eyes focused on Levi.

  “Okay, Levi,” Riles said. “What the hell is going on?”

  Levi clicked the red power button on the remote control in his left hand and the wall-mounted display opposite Admiral Riles came to life. A thirty-five-year-old man in a navy-blue suit, white shirt, and tie occupied the screen.

  “Sir, this is Agent Hal Bradford, the FBI special agent in charge of their Jamal Glover investigation. We’ve been monitoring all communications between Agent Bradford, his team, and his superiors. He is currently following up on a number of leads that point to Jamal Glover having gone to ground in Miami as he prepares to leave the country.”

  “What leads?”

  “Based on an anonymous tip, the FBI staked out a café in South Beach, where a UPS truck dropped off a package. The owner said he’d been paid to accept the package and that a man matching Jamal’s description was supposed to stop by to pick it up before closing time last night. When Jamal never showed up, the FBI figured he must have spotted them.”

  “What was in the package?”

  “Three fake passports bearing Jamal’s picture. French, Peruvian, and Egyptian. The documents were top-notch. There were also three bundles of cash, denominated in each of those country’s currencies. The FBI is trying to trace the package back to its sender but no luck so far.”

  Levi watched the admiral lean back in his chair and waited for him to speak.

  “So who’s playing them?” Riles asked.

  “We’re pretty sure it’s the Chinese.”

  Levi clicked a button on the remote and a new image replaced that of Agent Bradford, one that was well known to both Levi and Admiral Riles. It wasn’t an official photo, but it had been taken with a high-definition camera. Interpol hadn’t volunteered it, but that hadn’t kept the NSA from acquiring it. In the picture, a lean-muscled Qiang Chu stared directly up into the camera, wearing a smile that didn’t quite make it into his dark eyes.

  Levi continued. “This was taken from a Paris hotel balcony just over two months ago. The French agent who took it was found dead shortly after transmitting the digital image back to his headquarters.”

  “And you believe Qiang Chu is responsible for Jamal’s disappearance?”

  “Yes, sir.” Levi advanced the slide show to the next image. It showed a man stepping out of a black Lexus into a strip-mall parking lot. Despite his sunglasses and the poor image quality, the man’s features were familiar. “Based on Big John’s interpretation of the data, we retrieved security video footage from the Snowden Square Shopping Center in Columbia, Maryland. The shopping center is less than a mile from Jamal Glover’s house and this image was captured less than three hours before Jill McPherson was murdered in Jamal’s kitchen.”

  Levi saw Admiral Riles turn his attention to Dr. Jennings. “What’s your level of confidence in this?”

  “Sir, Big John has assigned a 0.93 correlation factor to Qiang Chu’s involvement in Jill McPherson’s murder and the subsequent disappearance of Jamal Glover.”

  The lines at the corners of the admiral’s eyes tightened. “Don’t you think that’s an unusually high level of confidence considering the limited and conflicting data?”

  Despite the aggressive tone of the admiral’s question, Denise didn’t back off. “It’s Big John’s estimate, not mine. Based on past experience, I don’t doubt him.”

  “It, not him!” Levi felt Riles’s irritation like an electric charge in the air.

  “Pardon?” Denise asked.

  “Big John is a genetically evolving neural net, not a person. I’ve told you before that I find your terminology distracting and annoying.”

  Although Levi was well aware of Riles’s annoyance with the way Dr. Jennings thought of Big John, the admiral’s level of impatience surprised him. It was a clear sign of the threat that Jamal’s disappearance represented to the NSA and, by extension, to the American government. It was also an indication of how much pressure President Tom Harris was bringing to bear on the NSA director.

  Dr. Jennings ran a hand up over the to
p of her head as if checking to ensure that the tight bun was still fastened firmly in place. Suddenly aware of her nervous reaction, she lowered her hand and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Levi leaned forward. “No matter how much weight we give to Big John’s analysis, I happen to agree with the result. The FBI trail is just too obvious and Jamal Glover is far too good at what he does to let them discover it that way. If I’m right, then a foreign government is planting false trails. That picture of Qiang is too big a coincidence for it to be anybody but the Chinese. I think they’ve got Jamal and are trying to smuggle him out of the country.”

  “Tell me we’ve got more than that.”

  “Qiang Chu is very good at covering his trail, but our imagery analysts have been able to cobble together a mosaic from satellite data and video cameras.”

  Levi pressed another button and the video screen shifted to a tiled display showing views from multiple cameras. Some of the frames were showing full-motion video while others were filled with high-resolution satellite images, all tagged with the date and time they were taken.

  Levi narrated as he pointed the red dot from a laser pointer at frame after frame.

  “Jamal’s car pulled into his garage at 8:35 P.M. on Friday evening. Forty-five minutes later, it backed out again. We picked up the car on a number of cameras as it made its way up onto I-95 north toward Baltimore. At 9:48 p.m., it pulled into this warehouse at an industrial park just outside Linthicum, Maryland.

  “A white panel van pulled out of the warehouse shortly after 10 p.m. and made its way to a freight shipping facility on the north side of BWI airport.”

  Admiral Riles interrupted. “Was that the only vehicle to leave the Linthicum warehouse?”

  “No. Shortly after midnight a big rig exited the building and took Highway 295 to D.C., where it stopped at another warehouse before going on to Richmond.” Levi turned off the wall-mounted display, then redirected his gaze to Admiral Riles. “We’ve already had people on the ground at all of these locations.”

  “And?”

  Levi found himself wishing he had better confidence in what he was about to say, but it was all he had. “There’s no sign of Jamal’s car at the Linthicum warehouse or at any of the locations where the big rig stopped. The shipping manifest included crates of auto parts, but those checked out. Neither the driver nor the loading dock crews admit to having seen the car or Jamal. Luckily, none of that matters.”

  Riles leaned forward over the table, his left hand cupping his right fist below his chin. “Why the hell not?”

  “The car’s a smoke screen. When it turns up, it will lead authorities down another false trail. I’m convinced that Jamal was in the white van that went to BWI. That freight shipping center belongs to International Shipping Service, or ISS. ISS was busy loading one of its aircraft when the van arrived at the center. That aircraft departed BWI at 11:52 P.M., made a stop in Kansas City, Missouri, to off-load and take on more cargo, before continuing on to Oakland.”

  Levi met the admiral’s steady gaze. He’d spent a long time building the trust he was about to put on the line for little more than an educated guess. “If you believe, like I do, that Qiang Chu took Jamal, they damn sure wouldn’t off-load him in Kansas City or ship him to D.C. or Richmond. They’d want to get him to the West Coast and then probably onto a ship headed for China.”

  “Why not on an aircraft?”

  “Qiang Chu would have anticipated that we’d be closely monitoring all international outbound flights by mid-morning on Saturday. But his Boeing 757 would have already landed in Oakland and off-loaded its cargo.” Levi put all the self-assurance he could muster into his next statement. “We need to get our team to the San Francisco Bay Area as quickly as possible.”

  Admiral Riles leaned back in his chair, his left hand stroking his chin as he weighed Levi’s arguments. Familiar with the way the admiral wielded his extended silences to pull extra information from whoever was briefing him, Levi held his tongue and waited.

  Seeing that no more information would be forthcoming, Riles rose to his feet. “Okay. We’ll let the FBI focus on this end. As soon as Jack Gregory arrives this afternoon, get the team briefed and moving.”

  The admiral redirected his attention to Dr. Jennings. “Denise. Modify your Big John query accordingly. By the time our ghosts set foot in California, I want a more specific target.”

  Without another word, Admiral Riles turned and walked out of the small conference room. As Levi followed him out, he hoped like hell that his analysis of this situation was correct. God help them all if the Chinese gained access to everything Jamal Glover knew.

  CHAPTER 12

  Janet Price approached Baltimore/Washington International Airport still trying to suppress her irritation with Levi Elias. When Levi had overruled Spider Sanchez’s decision to personally pick up Jack at the airport, assigning the task to Janet instead, she’d voiced her objections. But Levi had refused to listen. So here she was, approaching a rendezvous that was bound to be both awkward and painful. On the plus side, she’d certainly be ready to kill someone once the team got the go order.

  As she turned onto the arrivals loop, she spotted Jack Gregory standing on the curb outside the baggage claim area, a canvas duffel bag slung over his left shoulder. Her sudden spike in heart rate surprised her. When she’d last seen him in Miami, the curly brown hair had been fairly close-cropped. Now, clad in shorts, sandals, and a wild Hawaiian shirt that accentuated his tan body, he could have been a world-class surfer traveling to find some big, storm-driven waves. But Janet knew that beneath his shirt a web of knife and bullet scars decorated Jack’s lean-muscled torso.

  Janet pulled the black Ford Explorer into an open space at the curb, pressed the button that raised the rear hatch, unbuckled her seat belt, and leaned across the console to shove open the passenger-side door. Having spotted her as she approached, Jack tossed his duffel in the rear, closed the hatch, and slid into the passenger seat, accompanied by the heat and humidity of the late afternoon. Neither his grin nor his brown eyes held any echo of the mistrust she’d thrown in his face before she’d walked away from him in South Beach.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  “It’s good to see you.”

  Janet pulled out into traffic and headed toward the airport exit.

  “Is it?”

  “Every time.”

  His easy laugh brought forth a bright memory: Jack sitting next to her at a sidewalk café on Crete as they sipped cappuccino and gazed out over the deep blue Mediterranean Sea. Angry at herself, Janet pushed the image from her thoughts.

  “You look rested,” she said.

  “Hawaii has that effect on me.”

  Janet took the ramp onto I-195 and accelerated into the fast lane. “That’s good. You’re going to need it.”

  “What exactly is it we’re supposed to be doing? Levi just said I’d be briefed once I link up with the rest of the team.”

  “Just sit back and relax. You’ll be briefed along with the rest of the team when we get to the farmhouse.”

  Beside her, she felt Jack acquire some of the tension that bound her body.

  “Okay,” he said. “You don’t like the fact that Riles contracted my services and assigned me to your team for this operation. But he did. So act like the professional you are and get over Bolivia. I have.”

  This time Janet laughed. “Really? Don’t bullshit me, Jack. You may be looking tan and rested, but I don’t believe for a second that you’ve gotten past what happened down there.”

  Janet heard his voice soften dangerously.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  “You see, Jack? That’s the problem. How can I trust you when you don’t trust yourself? You told me as much in Crete. I just didn’t believe you. It took Bolivia to convince me.”

  From the corner of her eye, Janet saw Jack’s ey
es harden. Then he settled back in his seat, facing front as she merged onto I-95 north. The way he’d looked at her had been brief, but if Jack had punched her in the gut, he couldn’t have more thoroughly robbed her of breath. Jesus! She hadn’t meant to say what she’d said. For some reason this strange man’s presence spun her about as no other had ever done, and that scared the hell out of her.

  Janet drove on in silence and Jack made no effort to break it. They looped around west Baltimore, took I-70 west to Frederick, and then turned north on Highway 15. After she parked the SUV inside the barn, Jack walked to the rear of the Explorer, grabbed his duffel, and followed her toward the farmhouse. As they approached, Levi Elias and Spider Sanchez stepped off the front steps to meet them. Spider’s powerful stride carried him to Jack first, a broad grin spreading across his face.

  Instead of the hearty handshake Janet expected, the two men embraced, slapping each other on the back before stepping back.

  “Damn fine to see you, Jacky Boy!” Spider said.

  Jack’s grin matched that of the NSA team leader. “It’s been a long time, Spider.”

  “The surfer dude look is working for you.”

  Levi, who had also been closely watching the reunion, stepped forward and extended his right hand. “Hi, Jack. I’m Levi Elias. Glad you agreed to join us.”

  Jack shook the senior NSA analyst’s hand. “Janet was a little shy on the details. Mind filling me in?”

  Janet met Levi’s quick glance, then watched as he turned toward the door.

  “Let’s step inside,” he said.

  When they entered the living room, a familiar scene unfolded, one that Janet had experienced many times. None of the others stood to shake Jack’s hand. Instead they lounged on the chairs and couches, watching Jack with the cold curiosity common when a new member was introduced to an elite team. Except for Spider, none of these men knew Jack. They were all the “show me” kind, preferring to form their own opinions of a newbie’s competence and reliability.