by Melissa Good
"Hope they're not too pissed," Dave said. "I'd hate to have them just go off at you, ma'am."
"I'm used to it," Kerry said. "I've done a lot of new client consolidations and contract challenges," she assured him. "And my very first confrontation with ILS was with Dar Roberts. It kind of goes downhill from there, you know what I mean?"
Dave produced a surprised little laugh. "Ms. Roberts sure is something."
"She sure is," Kerry readily agreed.
They passed through a larger hallway, and came around a corner where a security door blocked the way. "Guest sections past there," Dave said. "You want me to go with you?"
Kerry was pretty good at reading body language, but in this case she had no need do. Dave's voice told her everything she needed to know. "Nah." She patted him on the shoulder. "Hang in there, Dave. Just try to keep what we have working, running as smoothly as possible, and call me if anything starts going to hell, okay?"
"You got it," Dave said, watching as she held her badge to the door. "Good luck."
"Thanks." Kerry went through the door, now finding herself in the two level, stately lobby that featured a big reception desk on one side, and a glassed in conference space on the other. She could see several people inside the conference hall, and she paused to settle her nerves before she headed for them.
"Oh, Ms. Stuart?" the receptionist spotted her. "Sorry, didn't realize you were here. The gentlemen were asking for you."
"I bet." Kerry gave her a wry smile.
"Would you like some coffee brought in? We've been holding off," the woman said, her nose wrinkling. "They weren't really very nice."
"Go ahead." Kerry patted the desk. "Let me go see what I can do with them." She shouldered her briefcase and approached the entrance to the conference center, pausing at the door way just long enough to interrupt the heated conversation inside before she entered. "Good morning."
The men had been caught by surprise. They turned and watched her as she made her way around the table to the head of it, setting down her brief case and leaning her fingertips on the polished wood surface. "Okay. Let's start with who you gentlemen are, what department of the government you work for, and who your bosses are."
The men glanced at each other in some slight puzzlement.
"I'll start. My name's Kerrison Stuart. I'm the Vice President of operations for ILS," Kerry said. "I think you can appreciate that I have a slate of issues to deal with taller than I am so if we can discuss what your issue is quickly and efficiently, I'd really appreciate it."
Now they all looked at one of the men, an older gentleman of middling height, with copper curly hair. They all had dark suits on, and Bluetooth earpieces and Kerry suspected their jacket pockets held identical pairs of dark sunglasses they had no use for at the moment.
"Okay," the ginger haired man said. "I'm Dan Cutter. I'm the agent in charge for this area for the Secret Service."
"Okay," Kerry said. "So, I guess you're different people who want something from us than the gentleman from the NSA who is on his way here."
"NSA." one of the other men said. "What do they want?"
"The NSA's on the way here? Who?" Cutter asked. "This is not their jurisdiction."
Oh Jesus. "Please sit down." Kerry did so, folding her hands on the table. "Suppose you tell me what you need, before they get here and confuse things."
Cutter did. "Listen, Ms. Stuart. No offense but your people here don't seem to know there's a crisis going on."
"They know," Kerry said. "Every single person in this corporation knows."
"Well, then they don't seem to want to cooperate," Cutter said. "We have a surveillance appliance we need to install here, and they won't let us."
"I won't let you," Kerry corrected him. "The people here don't have the authority to either grant or deny that request."
"What?" Cutter stood up. "Listen, lady, who in the hell do you think you are?" I'm a Treasury officer! You've been blocking my men since yesterday and I'm not going to put up with it a minute more!"
Kerry remained seated. "I am the vice president of operations for this company," she repeated. "I am under no legal obligation to allow you to enter this facility. In fact, I have a mandate to not allow anyone unauthorized from entering it, and please don't try to browbeat me." She merely gazed up at him. "Why don't you start by explaining to me what exactly you need to do, and what information you're looking for?"
"I don't have to do that."
Kerry shrugged. "I don't have to continue speaking to you. This facility is secured. There are high level government accounting systems that process through it. If you seriously think I am going to let some people from some agency with some unknown device come in and connect to that frankly sir, you are nuts."
"I can arrest you," Cutter said. "For obstruction."
"You can," Kerry agreed. "But that's not going to get you your information. These people here not only will not help you, they cannot. Our systems are in security lock down mode."
Cutter stared at her.
Kerry gazed back at him. "Would you like to tell me what you gentlemen are looking for? Before you go off arresting me and causing yourself a lot of trouble, it would help to know if what you need is even in here."
"Cutter, sit." The man seated at the far end of the table spoke up. He was tall, and dark, and had a Latin accent. "Ms. Stuart, my name is Lopez." He stood up and came around the table. "I know you have your responsibilities to take care of, but so do we."
Kerry decided this apparent bait and switch was legitimate, and that this was the actual boss of the group. She and Dar played that game sometimes with new companies. "Mr. Lopez." She tapped her thumbs together. "No, I don't think you really do understand what kind of responsibilities I have here." She stood and opened the whiteboard at the back of the room.
Lopez stopped and waited.
She turned and faced them. "I have a quarter of a million employees," she said. "I have two dozen of them missing in New York, and a dozen missing in Washington." She turned and scribbled on the board. "I have most of the infrastructure for communications down in Manhattan. I have an entire secure multipoint structure to restore in the Pentagon." She scribbled again. "I have overseas links down, a major satellite uplink used by the Navy down, bandwidth shifted in gigabits to cover planes in Newfoundland and Vancouver, satellite endpoints to establish, cellular backhaul to rebuild, and last by not least, several hundred major financial and banking customers who are depending on us to put them back in operation and prevent a major financial crisis."
She turned and faced him. "Now explain to me again why I am in this room, listening to you bitch at me for something you won't explain instead of letting me go and do my job bringing this country back from crisis?"
Lopez blinked at her.
"As my late father would have said, put it on the table, or take a hike." Kerry found the irony almost painful, but the quote fit. "I don't have time to play games with you." She could feel an exquisite tension in her guts, and knew she was playing with fire. She could see in Lopez's face that he wasn't a goon, and he could, in fact, drag her ass off to jail and might very well do so.
"This is a matter of national security," Lopez said.
"I have a top secret clearance," Kerry shot right back. "Next excuse?"
Lopez sat down in the chair next to hers. "Okay."
Kerry sat down, and folded her hands.
"Close the door." Lopez looked at Cutter. "Is this room secure?"
"It is," Kerry said. "We had them sweep for security yesterday after you first got here." She paused. "Though, I would still love to know where the NSA fits in."
Lopez frowned. "First things first." He waited for the door to be shut, and glanced up as the air compressed a little around them. "Soundproofed?"
"Yes," Kerry said, quietly.
"Okay." Lopez looked a little more relaxed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't realize the extent of your company's involvement in all this. I was told you were simp
ly a service provider."
Kerry nodded. "Then I understand your approach," she said. "Please go on."
"This device," Lopez said. "We suspect that the people who planned and executed the atrocities yesterday are still here, still planning, still executing more horrible things. We have to find them. Do you understand how critical that is? We have very little time."
Kerry nodded again. "Okay, what exactly is this device looking for?" She held a hand up when he started to protest. "I don't want to know specifics. I need to know what type of data stream you're hoping to intercept. Are you thinking these people will be trying to attack the government financial systems?"
"They could be," Lopez nodded. "This device analyzes conversations and determines if they are of interest to us."
"Conversations from where? Inside the government?"
"No. From the public."
Kerry sighed. "Then you're in the wrong place," she said. "There's no public access here."
Lopez frowned. "There isn't?"
"No," Kerry said. "These are all closed systems. Isolated."
Lopez turned to Cutter. "Didn't you say they had internet access from here?"
"That's what I was told," Cutter said. "The guys in accounting said they had internet." He looked accusingly at Kerry. "You saying they're lying?"
"No," Kerry said. "They get internet via our secure gateway," she said. "But that's not here. They go out to the internet via three different nodes-in New York, Chicago, and Dallas." She got up and drew a rough circle, with three points on it, then put an X near one edge. "The request goes through two NATS and three different gateways. There's no outside access."
"Shit," Cutter muttered.
Kerry could see the consternation around the table. She almost felt sorry for the men. "If it's any consolation, the systems here are protected. I won't quote my boss and say they're un-crackable because it gets us into trouble, but they are secure. Feel free to run tests against them."
"Shit," Cutter repeated. "We wasted a whole fucking day."
Lopez rubbed his temples. "Ms. Stuart, are you telling us the truth?" He looked up into Kerry's eyes. "People's lives can depend on your answer. We have to find these people."
Kerry gazed gravely back at him. "I'm telling the truth," she said. "If you really want to tap public access, you need to go to the tier 1 providers, and put your appliance there," she said. "We provide our own access for our customers, but the rest of the country uses one of them.
"Tier 1?" Lopez got out a pad and scribbled that down. "Can you give me the names?"
Kerry promptly provided them. "There are lots of smaller companies, but those three form the public backbone," she told him. "Now I will tell you that we maintain a lot of filtering capability on our net access nodes. If there's something, some phrase or type of information you are looking for specifically, I would be glad to put a scanning routine in place and output the results to you."
"You would?" Lopez lost some of his menace. "You can do that?"
"Just let us know," Kerry said. "The security of the country is very important to us. The government is one of our biggest clients."
Now the men were nodding, and the whole atmosphere had completely changed. "Okay." Lopez handed her his business card. "We'll be in touch, Ms. Stuart. Thanks for the info."
Kerry selected one of her own cards and handed it over. "Good luck," she said sincerely. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to head out to the Pentagon."
Lopez extended a hand. "Sorry about this whole thing, Ms. Stuart." He shook Kerry's hand. "Everything's in a lot of flux right now. We're all scrambling."
"Us too." Kerry felt a sense of relief, and more than a little pride. "Gentlemen?"
They filed out, and headed for the door, walking quickly and bending their heads together as they left the building. Kerry watched through the smoked glass as they got into their SUVs and pulled away, and shook her head. "Wow."
The receptionist looked over at her. "Are they gone?" she said, as a service person arrived with a cart of coffee. "Wow. That was fast."
Kerry shrugged modestly. "Bring that up to wherever they've stuck me." She told the service person. "I'm sure I'll need it." She turned to the receptionist. "I'm expecting someone else from the government looking for me. I'll be here for another thirty minutes or so, and if they're not here by then, I'm heading for the Pentagon."
"Yes ma'am." The receptionist scribbled a note.
"Good to have you here."
Kerry smiled and headed for the security door, her shoulders straightening. "Wish Dar had seen that one," she muttered to herself as she swiped through. "She'd have loved it."
Chapter Fifteen
THE SMALL COCKPIT was getting very crowded. Dar stood just outside the door, her hands braced on the frame as she listened to Alastair arguing somewhat forcefully on the radio.
The steward had edged back out of the way and was busy in the galley, seemingly glad not to be involved in what was going on.
Dar didn't blame him. In front of her, Alastair was perched on a small jump seat behind the seats that the pilots were in, crammed in next to the slim, dark haired navigator.
Everyone was nervous. She could see the pilots all trading off watching their instruments with looking back at Alastair, as the intractable voices on the other end of the radio got angrier and more belligerent.
Not good. "Alastair." Dar leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder. "Should I try to get Gerry involved?"
Alastair glanced back at her. "Hold that thought." He turned back to the radio. "Lieutenant? Are you there?"
The radio crackled. "Listen mister, I don't know who you think you are but you better just listen to instructions and shut the hell up before I send planes up there to blow you out of the sky."
"Nice," Dar said. "Sad to say, I grew up with jerks like that."
"Son." Alastair kept his voice reasonable and even. "You don't really need to know who I am. If you've got your last paycheck stub, just pull it out and look at the logo in blue on the right hand side on the bottom. That's the company I work for. We're not terrorists," he said. "So stop threatening us."
The radio was silent for a bit. Alastair let the mic rest against his leg, and shook his head. "What a mess," he said. "I appreciate things are in chaos down there, but for Pete's sake we don't even want to land in the damn country."
The pilot nodded. "That's what I tried to explain to him," he said. "He just kept saying security threat, security threat. I couldn't get a word in edgewise." He glanced back at Dar. "Are you in the military, ma'am?"
"No." Dar felt a surprising sense of relief at the admission. "My father was career Navy. I grew up on base."
The radio crackled. A different voice came on though. "This is Commander Wirkins. Is this Mr. McLean?"
"Ah." Alastair picked the mic up. "Maybe we're getting somewhere." He clicked it. "It is," he said. "Go ahead, Commander."
"Mr. McLean, we've established who you are. We understand you are trying to file an amended flight plan," the commander said. "Due to a situation in the area, I have to ask you to please instruct your pilot to land in Nassau. This is not negotiable."
"Something's going on." Dar shook her head. "Damn."
"Commander." Alastair gathered his thoughts. "I appreciate that you have your own issues," he said. "So let me ask you this. If we land in Nassau and your people are satisfied we're not going to hurt anyone, can we get cleared to fly into the States so your pit stop doesn't cause a delay in what we have to do?"
"Mr. McLean, you're not in a position to bargain with us."
Alastair sighed. "All right then, please put your ass in your chair and call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Get Gerald Easton on the line," he said. "I'm about out of patience with you too. He was going to send a plane for us, damn well shoulda let him."
Silence on the radio.
"If they force us down," Dar said. "Chances are they're not going to let the plane take off again."
The pilot
glanced over his shoulder at her. "We'll be out of air time anyway," he said. "No offense folks, but the storm would have been a better option."
"Agreed," Alastair held his hand up. "My fault. Sorry about that."
The radio remained silent.
"It's only about four, five hours from Miami by sea," Dar said. "We can charter a boat to get there."
The co pilot turned and looked at her. "Ma'am, are you crazy? That's not a trivial trip across the Gulfstream."
Dar didn't take offense. "I know," she said. "Been there, done that."
"I've been to the Bahamas. You won't get a captain to take you over like it is now. They're not stupid," the co pilot said. "They don't like risk."
"I'll captain it myself." Dar shrugged. "Pay enough money and they'll rent us a tub."
Both flyers looked at each other, then shook their heads. Alastair merely chuckled wryly.
Finally the radio buzzed. "Mr. McLean, this is Commander Wirkins."
"Go ahead," Alastair said. "At least we've got a plan B," he added, in an aside to Dar. "Though spending four hours bouncing over the Atlantic ain't my idea of fun."
"Mr. McLean, we're in a state of national emergency here and I do not appreciate, and my command does not appreciate you asking for special dispensation."
"Too bad," Alastair said, in a genial tone. "We have a job to do, mister, and you're keeping me from it. You may think it's got nothing to do with you, but if you do about ten minutes research on who we are, you'll catch a clue that's not the case."
The commander cleared his throat into the open mic. "I have done that research, or believe me, buddy there'd be two fighters up there blowing your ass out of the sky right now," he said. "So like I said, I don't appreciate you dropping names, no matter how justified you think you are."
Dar held her hand out. "Gimme."
"C"mon Dar." Alastair bumped her knee with his elbow. "He's about to cave. He's just pissing all over the wall so everyone knows what a big guy he is first." He clicked the mic. "Fish or cut bait, Commander."
"Well, Mr. McLean, sorry to tell you, but you're not getting to where you want to go today," the commander said, a note of smugness in his voice that made both Dar and Alastair's lips twitch. "You can call me an asshole if you want to, and report me to whoever you want to, but I've got a job to do too, and I'm going to do it."
