Patriot Act

by James Phelan

  He put his feet up on the coffee table and sat back in the cushioned armchair, a little fifteen-minute ritual he allowed himself each morning to go over the contents of the main dailies.

  His eyes skimmed the news but his brain was working overtime. He checked his watch, waiting for the next call from Fox when he landed in New York. Should have been by now …

  16

  NEW YORK CITY

  The summer sun was beating down mid-morning, setting the day up to be a scorcher, the humidity hitting Fox and Kate as they walked out of the air-conditioned sanctuary of JFK Airport. Outside the terminal they were met by Richard Sefreid, the head of security for GSR. The big no-nonsense former army ranger walked ahead of them to the waiting car, scanning for threats as he went.

  “Head for West 76 and Riverside please, Richard,” Fox said, sitting with Kate in the back seat.

  “Got it,” Sefreid said, pulling away from the kerb with a squeal of tyre rubber, checking his mirrors every few seconds. There was a chase car behind them, an identical black Mercedes ML320D, with two armed GSR security operatives inside. The small outfit of ex-military and law enforcement personnel were used to their role of protecting company journalists who stuck their necks out too far.

  “You okay?” Fox quietly asked Kate, putting a hand on her leg.

  “Yeah,” she replied, looking out the window at the city she’d grown up in.

  At least she got some rest on the flight, Fox thought, catching a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror. He certainly hadn’t received any such respite. He’d stayed awake the entire time while with her, ever watching, ever there, always on his game. Her sleep on the flight had been fairly sound, he was glad to see. She didn’t need to know what the nightmares were like.

  She was silent, and Fox wondered what that silence meant to her. They’d stayed in their dark sleeper cabin the entire train ride to Lithuania, hours of hot, sweaty entanglement and quiet embrace. Was that something she’d already forgotten?

  In the capital city of Vilnius they’d met a local mob boss on the CIA’s payroll. His private airfield, guarded by the country’s military, was frequently used by the CIA and DoD to move prisoners around Europe and the Middle East. From there a jet leased through a Canadian-based business, untraceable back to the CIA, took the pair straight to New York.

  Fox took Kate’s hand in his for the drive to her parents’ residence in Manhattan. He noticed she no longer squeezed his hand as if from fear of him leaving. Now it was as if she was ready to move on and rely on her parents for support.

  At the Matthews’ apartment building on West 79th, Kate’s parents met her at the door.

  “Mum,” she said, falling into her mother’s arms as she entered. They went off to Kate’s bedroom, and he could hear her crying the tears she’d been holding on to since Russia.

  “Thank you for bringing my daughter back,” Mr Matthews said, offering his hand. “Frank Matthews.”

  “Lachlan Fox,” he said, shaking hands with the guy who measured a good six-four, looking all the world like a smiling Clint Eastwood.

  “I just made a pot of coffee,” Frank said, leading the way out of the entry hall. “Real, too, no decaf in this house.”

  “Sounds good,” Fox replied, figuring the coffee comment was a parental way of trying to bring some normality to the bizarre events they’d heard about over the phone from the plane. He followed Frank Matthews through to the sitting room. Persian rugs covered walnut timber floorboards, the dadoes and walls were a calming shade of pale green and the timber blinds let light through.

  “Take a seat,” Frank said, gesturing to an overstuffed armchair. The coffee was set up on the low table between them, the dark brew in the French press promising a good wake-up call.

  “Black is fine, thanks,” Fox said, settling into the chair and taking the steaming mug.

  “So, is there any more information on what happened to my daughter?” Frank asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “Other than what Kate told you from the plane, that’s all there is for now,” Fox said.

  “Who would do this?” Frank asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really have the answer to that,” Fox told him. “The who, the why, I have no idea.”

  “Who will be investigating this? Americans, I hope.”

  “The FBI will be investigating, I’m sure, with the cooperation of the Moscow CIA office and federal Russian authorities,” Fox said, and he could see the man was not impressed by this latter piece of information. “You’d be surprised, their security services are actually pretty capable, particularly when the case involves a high-value foreigner like John Cooper.”

  “Okay,” Frank said, leaning forward with his gangly elbows resting on his knees. He stared at the coffee table for a while, his expression a mixture of frustration and anger. “What can we do? I mean, what happens from here for Kate?”

  “My colleague has given details of what happened at the palace to the US embassy in Moscow along with government offices here,” Fox replied, sipping his coffee and putting it down on the table. “The State Department will be sending someone here at noon today. They will need her account of what happened, and they’ll supply a psychologist to help her work through the trauma.”

  “You’ve been through this before?” Frank gave Fox a look that further reminded him of Eastwood—more Eastwood the fatherly director than Dirty Harry.

  “Unfortunately, I’ve seen my fair share of death,” Fox admitted. He looked into his coffee, then up at Frank. He didn’t know what else he could say to this man, other than he’d do his best to find out the truth.

  “How long have you been a journalist for?”

  “Spent some time doing my own little rag back in Australia. A few investigative pieces got me noticed, and I’ve been with the Global Syndicate of Reporters for just over a year now,” Fox said. “We’re a team of investigative journalists, and I always seem to get the gigs where I’m in the worst places in the world, where morality—or rather humanity—has left in favour of desperation through necessity—or just plain evil.”

  “There’s certainly no shortage of that, and it’s something I’m sure we could discuss at great length another time,” Frank said. Fox could see the man was genuinely interested in what he would have to say. “And you spent some time in the military, as an officer?”

  “Yeah,” Fox said, giving him an inquisitorial look. “What gives it away?”

  “How you carry yourself. My brother, father, grandfather, all went through West Point,” Frank said. “Although they’d all say that your hair is a little over regulation.”

  “Yeah, well, I spent some time in the military, back in Australia,” Fox said. “Working for GSR I’m now based here in New York, and I travel the world looking after the military portfolio. I became an expert by default, in a field that’s in high demand these days, what with Iraq and all.”

  “Been over there?”

  “Yeah, served there for a bit,” Fox said. “Not in a hurry to get back, though. It gets a huge amount of coverage anyway, more than ten times what a crisis place like Darfur gets, which, when you consider the body-count comparison, is a criminally disproportionate press skew.”

  The pair sat in silence for a moment. Fox looked at his watch; he should have checked in with McCorkell by now.

  “Do you think this attack on Cooper and my daughter was random?”

  “Unlikely,” Fox replied.

  “And no leads whatsoever?” Frank asked.

  “I’m sorry, Frank, I know it’s frustrating as hell,” Fox said. “I’m determined to find out, though.”

  The phone rang and Frank picked it up. Fox took the opportunity and stood to leave.

  “I’ll just be a sec, Lachlan,” Frank said, covering the mouthpiece. “It’s Kate’s boyfriend, I’m sure it would do her good to talk to him.”

  Fox watched as Frank walked out of the room with the portable h
andset. He was disappointed, but it now started to make sense. That look in her eyes when they’d met, there was something she was hiding, something she was not letting out. At least she had a lot of support right now.

  Across the street from the Matthews’ building, behind the blacked-out windows of a contractors’ van, a DGSE agent aimed at Fox as he walked out onto the sidewalk. He had watched as the pair entered twenty minutes earlier, Fox’s back to the agent as he led Kate into the building.

  Now the agent had a good, clear shot, and as Fox walked to the waiting SUV the agent’s finger squeezed, the button held down as the digital camera clicked away.

  17

  FRANCE

  “Keep a tail on him,” Secher said to his lead DGSE agent in New York.

  “Yes, Major.”

  Secher’s mind raced. The verbal description matched those from the scene at the palace—this was the man who had intervened on the attack on Cooper. Yet again, Danton’s near-sighted actions were making his job that much more difficult. While Secher thought Danton a fool for thickening the plot with the last assassination attempt, part of him relished the uncertainty of it. The fear of walking into the unknown. The challenge ahead. The game.

  “Visual observation, plant some bugs, whatever it takes. I want to know who he is, where he works, sleeps, eats.” Secher paused while a navy pilot in a Libelle G flight suit similar to his own entered the terminal. He made eye contact, tapping his watch to Secher, who nodded in reply.

  “In twenty-four hours I want to know who this man is,” Secher said into the phone. “Send me a message via the consulate in Sydney.”

  “Sydney, Australia?”

  “Yes,” Secher said. “And keep on him. By the time I get to New York, I want to know more about this man than he knows about himself.”

  “Yes, Major.”

  Secher hung up and followed the pilot out onto the windy tarmac of the Istres Air Base in the South of France. A row of delta-winged Dassault Rafale multi-role fighter aircraft lined the main taxiway, and Secher walked past the gleaming jets to his waiting ride.

  Closing up his state-of-the-art flight suit, he walked up the ladder and climbed into the aft seat of the production-line-fresh French Navy Dassault Rafale N. The pilot closed the canopy, getting the thumbs-up from the ground crew after they removed the wheel chocks. The plane taxied the short ride to the end of the runway, turning sharply and coming to a complete stop.

  “Hold on, Major,” the pilot said as he brought the engines to full burn, the airframe trembling under the pressure as the pilot released the brakes. The two-seater fighter jet, specially designed for aircraft-carrier use, shot forward and left the runway in three seconds, the afterburners blasting a sonic boom through the sound barrier.

  18

  NSA HQ FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  McCorkell followed Dunn into the supercomputing wing of the NSA headquarters. The noise inside the double-walled concrete building was an electrical buzz that sounded like a billion bees, and the air carried the electrical smell that came from having the world’s biggest and most powerful computers in a controlled air-space.

  “The basement here has its own power plant working parallel to the Maryland supply to maintain the cooling power needed by the machines,” Dunn said. He stopped at a viewing platform on the metal-meshed walkway.

  “This is it,” Dunn said, waving a hand around the open expanse of the floor. From this mezzanine level, they looked down at the computers, arrayed around what resembled a foil golf ball the size of a small house.

  “So in that structure is the code-maker that’s going to make us unbreakable?” McCorkell said.

  “Yep,” Dunn replied. “Quantum cryptography. Amazing to think it, but the small array of lasers in there provide an endless stream of photons that produce encryption for all our stored information. Other crypto systems are being implemented over the next six months to replace all security measures for our outside customers. That little room will do what ten thousand cryptographers and the biggest supercomputers on the planet cannot do.”

  “Photons, hey,” McCorkell said.

  “Yeah,” Dunn smiled. “Quantum does the crypto work, the latest Cray HPCS supercomputers system handles the grunt work. But I’m just an analyst by trade these days. You’ll need to speak to one of the tech boys if you want a deeper quantum physics explanation.”

  “Think I’ll pass, all the same,” McCorkell said.

  “Well, the beauty in her is this: as we are working with light, any disturbance, such as an attempted eavesdropping, is detected as it disturbs the carrier.”

  “So we’d know as soon as someone tried to hack in,” McCorkell said, starting to cotton on to one of the new system’s strengths.

  “Straightaway. And even if someone did tap into it, they’d never get any usable data. It’s faultless, bullet-proof.”

  “Not something I often hear from intel chiefs,” McCorkell mused.

  “You wouldn’t believe the amount of hacks we get on sensitive government networks each day. And it’s not just geeks doing it for kicks, now the terrorists have gone high-tech on us. Cell in Bahrain nearly shut down Pensacola air-traffic control last week.”

  “Why Pensacola?” McCorkell asked.

  “Why Bahrain?” Dunn walked McCorkell to a better vantage point. “And what’s more, beyond the security implications, switching to quantum cryptography is going to free up around half of our technical division who normally spend their days working on ways to build better encryptment technology for securing our own communication traffic.”

  “An increased workforce overnight,” McCorkell said. “Just don’t let Congress cotton on to that one, they’ll think there’s room for some fat to be trimmed.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. Shit, you know what kinda workload we got ahead of us.” Dunn motioned for them to walk back towards the doors leading into the operations building. “NSA grew up for the first forty years to spy on the Ruskies. Follow their fleet traffic, intercept their military communications and signals intel. Now we’re tracking millions of cell phones across the world, mining billions of emails…”

  “Sounds like you need a bigger vacuum,” McCorkell said. He followed Dunn into the lift, watching as the NSA Deputy Director pressed his thumb on the pad to access the executive floor.

  “Our vacuum’s plenty big enough. You say it, we record it.” Dunn shot McCorkell a sideways look. “Well, of course, not if you say it, nor any upstanding US citizen for that matter.”

  “Of course,” McCorkell said, certainly not needing to remind Dunn of the bad press the NSA got when listening in on UN Security Council members during the lead-up to Iraq. Like all intel news to hit the press, it’s only when they did something wrong that it was brandished around for the world to see. He knew Dunn was still paying for that one.

  “Imagine what Hoover’s boys would have made of this,” Dunn said. “FBI would love the keys to this place if they had the chance. And in a way I don’t blame them. Their problem’s almost getting too big too. Shut the borders, look within. We got enough problems in our backyard, let alone everyone else’s.”

  “So you’ve joined the isolationist camp?” McCorkell said, following Dunn out of the lift and down the white marble corridor.

  “No, not on your life, but I can see their point,” Dunn replied.

  “Hell, I wouldn’t mind if we adopted some of the foreign policies we had prior to the Second World War,” McCorkell said. “If we just concentrated on our own nation-building again. Hell, being more of a closed society would give you guys less foreign data to mine.”

  “Well, the data-mining capability is not so much the issue. We’ve got the computing power and storage space of God. As September 11 proved, what we don’t have are the fifty thousand linguists we need to properly translate all those communications in time. We have had to switch from simply gathering to hunting.”

  McCorkell cringed. The
September 11 intelligence blunder was the worst press the NSA had ever received. Its network of intercept systems picked up communications between the terrorists before the attacks, but the translation of those COMINT files occurred after the event. Hence the change in doctrine to go looking for the threat, rather than waiting for it to be fulfilled.

  “You have your Senate hearing in a couple of days?” McCorkell asked.

  “Yeah, I put it off as much as I could,” Dunn said. “The last change in the Senate means they’re dragging us over those same 9/11 coals again. The Democrats have been waiting for their chance to question me, and to do what they can to pull the Patriot Act apart. A waste of bloody time, of course, there’s nothing new the SSCI are gonna learn from me.”

  “Well, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was set up for just that purpose, wasn’t it?” McCorkell said. “Being so good at wasting time puts a new meaning to oversight. The price we pay for living in a democratic republic.”

  Dunn grunted.

  “How about computer programs, they still can’t make up the shortfall with translating the collected comms?” McCorkell asked.

  “To some degree,” Dunn said, showing McCorkell into his office. “We’re constantly upgrading them, working on hundreds of joint programs with DARPA and some of the off-the-shelf tech companies, and some good-looking stuff is coming out of it.”

  “Maybe I should buy some tech stocks again,” McCorkell commented.

  “There’s money to be made. But our problem here is that you can’t beat a pair of human eyes and ears to detect meaning in a person’s communication. Not yet, anyway.”