Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  For another, they had millions of men under arms and, in the coming years, that number would only swell. One of the unintended side effects of the Peoples Republic ’s one-child policy and the preference of Chinese families for boys was the creation of a lopsided generation in which males outnumbered females in a ratio 1.25 to 1. That was a lot of horny, frustrated boys, more than a quarter of whom were born losers who never would get any girl at all. The English used to deal with this by having one boy inherit the estate, the second son join the army, and the third take the cloth, but the Chinese had no cloth, and so droves of young males were heading into the army every day; if they couldn’t fuck they could damn sure fight.

  Worse, it told Seelye that even countries like Bulgaria and Israel and the lesser ’stans of the old Soviet Union had no fear of the American eagle, either. Al-Qaeda had taught Americans that a handful of zealots armed mostly with the element of surprise, ruthlessness of will, and the sheeplike nature of modern boobus Americanus could easily overpower a crew and turn the morning flight to Los Angeles into a guided missile; all it took was the audacity of a bunch of dopes who thought they were ticketed for paradise instead of a fiery inferno or a farmer’s field. Everyone, it seemed, felt free to poke the old lion.

  But even a czar wouldn’t be able to pry anything out of the NYPD if they didn’t want to give it up. New York City was its own country, and just as unafraid of Washington as everybody else.

  He pressed a buzzer on his desk, which connected him immediately to his assistant. In the old days, she would have been called his secretary, but somewhere along the line someone had decided this wasn’t politically correct.

  “Ms. Overbay?” he said. “Please ask Major Atwater to come up, please.”

  “Right away, Director,” replied Ms. Overbay. If someone put a gun to his head and demanded that he describe Ms. Overbay, he wasn’t sure he could do it. Everything about the modern workplace had become distant, defensive, protective, impersonal. If he could get through the day without interacting with anyone face-to-face, he would, and Seelye suspected that a lot of managers and office workers around the country felt the same way.

  It would take Atwater only a few minutes to hustle to the DIRNSA’s office. Seelye let his eyes roam over his desk, which was always kept as tidy as possible. But on this day there were a few items laid out on it, simple enough individually but disturbing when taken as a whole. Someone was trying to send him a message.

  Regarding the first, there was no doubt about its provenance. It was a letter, an old-fashioned letter, from Moscow, bearing the unique postal stamp of the Kremlin:

  “My dear Seelye,” it began, in English, obviously painstakingly translated in its writer’s head from the original Russian thoughts. And then, just as obviously, not. It read instead as if it had been passed through one of those Web translation programs, which rendered the most elegant original into snarling gibberish. “Long time I am retired but fashion change so I write tell you danger. Illegals program of course you know but what don’t know is that continued long after Soviet Union demise, people in place already, what else to do, nothing. But still election danger. Yours, N-.”

  The old Soviet “illegals program” was a long-running attempt to recruit, or insinuate, native-born sleeper agents into the U.S. government at the highest levels. Throughout his career, Seelye had monitored and tracked them, taking them out where he could-that was a real problem, since so many of them had graduated from elite prep schools like Hotchkiss and Choate, or from Harvard and Yale; there really were no traitors like old-money traitors, and the nouveau quota babies who aped them. But this note took the illegals program to a whole new level. Was an “illegal” now running for the highest office in the land?

  If the information was true-a big if-then this was a problem that no one in the U.S. government had ever before confronted. For nearly three centuries, it was assumed that both political parties were acting in good faith, that the candidates they offered were Constitutionally eligible, and beholden to no foreign power. But, aside from Article II, Section One, there was no check on eligibility. The people had to take the word of the parties that the candidates they offered up for consideration were, in fact, eligible. It didn’t matter whether the Constitution was “living” or “original,” the language was plain. And from that trust in the system flowed all else, including the military’s tradition of absolute deference to duly constituted civil authority, which most certainly included his own deference to the President of the United States, whoever might be currently occupying the office. Still, he was going to have a run a thorough background check on Angela Hassett-and on Jeb Tyler, for that matter, just to be fair.

  That task was certainly much easier today than it ever had been. There was a world of personal information about nearly every man, woman, and child in America available on the Internet and the amazing part was that-through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the other social-networking sites-the American public had made such information freely and publicly available.

  Which was why Government 2.0 had been such a success, depending on your point of view, of course. The executive branch didn’t need the NSA or any of the other intelligence agencies to compile their rosters and lists of the voting public, didn’t need spooks and FBI agents going door to door to inquire about people’s loyalty or sexual predilections or political persuasions: the public had already volunteered such information, even if it didn’t yet realize it. The thought of all this information in the wrong hands sometimes kept Seelye awake at night. It was all right if such material stayed relatively safely in the hands of professionals like himself, but now every political hack, twenty-something ideologue, and freelance double agent had access to it. It would, he knew, all end badly. He just hoped and prayed that he wouldn’t be around to see it happen.

  The note from the “Russian” was only one of several puzzling things on his desk. Spread out before him were several pieces of paper he had not yet shared with the president or anybody else. They were printouts of a series of anonymous e-mails that had come not through channels but directly to his in-box. His secure e-mail addresses-he had several, depending on the usage-were known to only a handful of staffers both in NSA/CSS and at the White House. They were classified Top Secret. And yet someone had at least one of them.

  “Dirnsa Seelye,” began the first one. “What are the Thirty-Nine Steps?”

  “Lt. General Armond Seelye or To Whom It May Concern,” ran the second. “Edgar Allan POE. (signed) the Magician.”

  The third was a bit more complex: “UG RMK CSXHMUFMKB TOXG CMVATLUIV.” It was unsigned.

  The fourth was a series of numbers: 317, 8, 92, 73, 112, 79, 67, 318, 28, 96, 107, 41, 631, 78, 146, 397, 118, 98, 114.

  The fifth was a series of 87 characters, squiggles based on the letter “E,” arranged in three rows:

  The sixth was the briefest of them all: “Masterman. XX.”

  All were, of course, ridiculously easy to recognize, if not to understand. The real question was what, cumulatively, did they mean? Were they a game? A warning? A threat? And did they have anything to do with what was going on in New York? In the wilderness of mirrors, everything was related and nothing was connected.

  Seelye spread the printouts on his desk and looked them over. How he longed for the days when written communications were actually written, or at least typed, and the paper could be subjected to various forms of analysis. In the old days, each typewriter had its own distinctive signature, like a fingerprint, and many was the criminal who went to jail, or the spy who was exposed when the papers came out of the pumpkin, or executed when his machine was found and identified. Not anymore. Today almost everything came electronically, even bills and junk mail, and thanks to the infinite permutations of ones and zeroes, anything could be encoded within anything else. Churchill’s famous comment about Russia, that it was a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” could now properly be applied to everything. Even e-mail.

/>   Well, that was part of the NSA’s brief, too. No Such Agency was founded by President Truman in 1952 to both collect and decode foreign signals (SIGINT) and to protect America ’s codes from hostile code breakers. The Second World War had made both encryption and cryptanalysis boom industries, and a wide variety of codes had been employed, everything from the Germans’ “Enigma” machine-named after the series of musical variations by the British composer, Sir Edward Elgar, to the Navajo “code talkers” who had worked for the Marine Corps in the Pacific theater.

  Still, in the end, code-breaking was all about patterns, even if those patterns were sometimes so deeply hidden that they resembled wheels within wheels, whose sprockets had to be carefully aligned for the message to be read and understood. Today, the volume and the magnitude of the threat was infinitely greater than it had been 75 years ago-one missed pattern and the next thing you knew there was a smoking, radioactive crater where midtown Manhattan or the Washington Monument had once stood.

  Which is where the Black Widow came in.

  The Black Widow was the in-house nickname of the NSA’s Cray supercomputer at Fort Meade. Forget privacy-no matter what the sideshow arguments in Congress were about the FISA laws or civil liberties, the Black Widow continued to go remorselessly about her job, which was to listen in on, and read, all telephonic and written electronic communication, in any language, anywhere in the world. It was the old Clinton-era “Echelon” project writ large, able to perform trillions of calculations per second as it sifted and sorted in its never-ending quest for key words, code words, patterns. The ACLU had screamed, but presidents from both parties had surreptitiously embraced it. The Black Widow was here to stay if only she could be heeded and translated in time.

  Wiretapping had come a long way. In the popular imagination-and in the minds of the media, which, to judge from the op-ed pages of the New York Times, now viewed everything through the lenses of bad movies and show tunes-“eavesdropping” still conjured up images of fake telephone repairmen in jump suits, shimmying up phone poles or cracking open service boxes in the sub-sub-basement and applying alligator clips to the switching machinery.

  None of that mattered anymore. It was all for show. the Black Widow not only heard all and read all, she could sense all: the technology had advanced to such an extent that the Widow and other Cray supercomputers like her-including the Cray XT4, known as the Jaguar, and the MPP (massively parallel processor) housed at the University of Tennessee-could read the keystrokes of a given computer through the electrical current serving the machine. And all linkable. If the Singularity wasn’t here yet, it would be soon.

  “Major Atwater is here, sir,” said Ms. Overbay’s disembodied voice. Seelye punched a button on his desk that unlocked his office door-security was everything here-and in came the major as the door closed behind him.

  Kent Atwater was from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, a place more celebrated for its evocative name than for any particular attraction, other than its mind-numbing winter weather. He had graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs with high marks in math and cryptography, and had distinguished himself with the 91st Missile Wing at Minot in North Dakota, first with the Gravehaulers of the 741st squadron, then with the Security Forces Group. In that capacity, he had caught the eye of NSA brass, been transferred to Fort Meade, and bumped up the chain in Seelye’s direction. Blond, strongly built, in his early 30s, he was a practically a caricature of what the world used to think of as a typical American but was now the vanishing remnant of a bygone ethnic archetype. Seelye liked and admired Atwater, although his demeanor never showed it, but the young Air Force officer had promise, which is why Seelye was grooming him as a possible deputy.

  “Sir?” said Atwater, saluting.

  “At ease, Major,” said Seelye, gathering up the sheaf of papers and handing them to Atwater. “Please take a look at these and give me your first reaction. Don’t think, just react. And please sit down.”

  Atwater was already through the papers by the time his rear hit the seat. He said, “Anybody who knows anything about the history of cryptography knows what these are. Someone with a literary bent.”

  “Indeed,” replied Seelye.

  “I mean, The Gold Bug, Dorothy L. Sayers, the Beale Treasure. The only thing missing is the Voynich Manuscript. What is this, sir, a treatment for the next National Treasure movie?”

  “You tell me, Major.”

  Atwater thought for a moment. “Well,” he began, “obviously it can’t be as simple as it looks.”

  “Does it really look that simple? And what if it is? Sometimes the best codes are the simplest.” Seelye suddenly flashed on those ridiculous “Dancing Men” from the Sherlock Holmes story, the substitution cipher that he had overlooked, but that had unlocked Devlin’s past, and thus given his most potent agent complete power over him, the nominal boss.

  Which brought today’s events full circle. President Tyler had just ordered Devlin into action, and Seelye had no choice but to obey. And yet, under his agreement with Tyler, Devlin could terminate Seelye at any time, for any reason. That was something that was going to have to change.

  “…me to do, sir?” Atwater was saying. Seelye looked up-

  “Sorry, Major, say again?”

  “I said, what do you want me to do, sir?” inquired Atwater.

  “I want you to track down the sender-that shouldn’t be too hard-and I want you to tell me what all these references to bygone codes-”

  “Some of which have never been cracked,” interjected Atwater. The man was evincing just the slightest signs of borderline insubordination, which was another thing that would have to be addressed. As if he’d read Seelye’s mind, Atwater immediately apologized. “If you’ll pardon the interruption, sir.”

  Seelye ignored the mea culpa. “Just give me your best assessment on this, Major. It goes without saying that, since this directly affects the operations of DIRNSA, your report is eyes-only.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  “That’s all.”

  Atwater shot to his feet. “Yes, sir,” he said, saluted once more, performed a crisp about-face, and pushed the door open the instant he heard Seelye unlock it.

  “Fail me not,” said Seelye as the Major left. Or maybe he said it to himself. It wasn’t clear, even to him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the air

  Emanuel Skorzeny was so absorbed in the numbers dancing in front of him on a computer screen that he almost forgot his manners. “Would you like a drink, my dear?” he inquired, reaching out to pat her on her knee. “A gin martini, ice-cold, just the way you like them? All you have to do is ask, and Mlle. Derrida here will be more than happy to fetch one for you. Isn’t that right, Mlle. Derrida?”

  Whether she was happy or not didn’t really matter. Emanuelle Derrida swallowed both her tongue and her pride as she awaited a request-no, an order-from the woman who had boarded the plane in Macao and who was now on her way with them toward their next destination. Where that was, exactly, Skorzeny had not told her, but it didn’t really matter: wherever he went, she went, no questions asked or answered.

  Amanda Harrington stiffened at his touch. That he was insane, there could be no doubt. After what he had done to her in London and in France, and now here, as if nothing untoward had occurred. And there was nothing she could do about it. She hated the evil bastard, and dreaded whatever it was he now wanted from her. Maybe a martini would help. She nodded assent, and Ms. Derrida went to fetch it, leaving them alone.

  Skorzeny gazed at her with those relentless eyes, so used to command, to fulfillment. Then he spoke:

  “It seems that we underestimated the opposition,” he began, without preamble, as if the past nine months were but a single day. That was Emanuel Skorzeny’s secret of success, an indefatigable focus, a refusal to accept defeat. “And of course the loss of…”-here it came-“the loss of Mr. Milverton was regrettable. But here again perhaps I overestimated his powers.” />
  Amanda had never fully learned the whole story of her lover’s last moments in London, and she had no way of knowing how much Skorzeny knew of her relationship with the man called Milverton. That he knew, of course, was indisputable-she was barely living proof of his jealousy and malice. “How did he die?” she managed to ask.

  “But here is Mlle. Derrida with your libation,” he said. The assistant set the drink down in front of her and awaited further instruction. “That will be all, Mlle. Derrida,” he said dismissing her. The woman shot Amanda a look as she left.

  “Happy days,” said Skorzeny.

  Amanda took a tentative, flinching sip. The last martini she had accepted from his hand nearly killed her. But if he had wanted her dead in Clairvaux, in that horrible prison he called a country retreat, he would have killed her. Instead, he’d paralyzed her as punishment for her love for Milverton.

  “I trust the libation is satisfactory?”

  Amanda knew that had she replied in the negative, Mlle. Derrida’s days in Skorzeny’s employment, if not upon this earth, would be numbered. She decided to let the girl live. “Yes, sir,” replied Amanda, setting the drink down on the spotless table.

  “Excellent. And now to work.” Skorzeny produced a manila folder, extracted a few papers, and spread them out on the desk. For a man addicted to computers-a facility remarkable in a man his age-he still preferred real paper for important things.