Tyranny of Secrets

by John Statton

  He walked into the hangar and over to a tool bench. He thought his new plan got high marks for simplicity, We’re going to drive off and get lost. At some point, I’m going to turn the car over to her. After that, she’s on her own. Looking up through the window of the hangar he noticed Blair walking towards the Jeep. Seth knew after he left earlier, the team had been dispatched back to the search for Sander. Blair was the only one expected.

  Seth did not expect the gunshot. What the hell? he thought. Blair stood by the Jeep with a pistol in his hand. Seth kept a wary eye on him as he walked out of the hanger, his weapon concealed in a coat pocket.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he peered inside the vehicle. Plain to see Mariana slumped in the seat with the back of her skull splattered over the head rest and back seat. His anger surged, but he carefully did not put it on display. “Looks like you just took matters into your own hands.”

  “Don’t get all sanctimonious with me, killer. This bitch and I have a long history. She was always going to end up like this tonight. I just wanted to be the one who pulled the trigger. This one I was prepared to do myself,” said Blair. The last part delivered in a mocking tone.

  Seth smiled as he stepped up to Blair and jabbed a Taser into his side. 50,000 volts made Blair’s muscles turn to jelly. He dropped the gun and slumped to the ground with a groan. “I quit,” said Seth to the night. He roughly grabbed Blair’s shirt and pulled him around to the driver’s side of the Jeep. It only took a moment to lift him in and zip-tie him to the seat. Blair was coming around, so Seth pushed a cleaning rag in his mouth. “I may not be able to stop what’s coming, but I can get rid of you,” said Seth. Blair’s eyes were looking around frantically and he futilely struggled.

  Seth continued to work and slid under the Jeep's side to attach a radio-controlled, magnetic mine to the gas tank. He booted his laptop and uploaded the control program to the Jeep. While it infected the vehicle’s systems, he lofted a drone and linked its camera to his laptop screen. He had a bird’s-eye, night vision view, and saw the car ready to go.

  He reached out and started the Jeep. Using the link to its systems, Seth drove it out of the field and down the plateau’s access road. Navigating it down the twisty road, he avoided the cliff edging the left-hand side. A turn he liked loomed up ahead and he floored the gas. The SUV rocketed forward, through the crash barrier, and plummeted three hundred feet to the granite teeth below.

  Seth watched it smash through the barricade and fly through space, making one, then two, lazy revolutions. Just before it completed its third turn, he clicked the button and exploded the charge on the gas tank. On the camera feed, he watched a deadly flower blossom on his screen. Seconds later the burning vehicle lay on the ground, shredded from impacting outcrops all the way down. Damn Blair, that was a Viking ending, he thought while smiling.

  He emailed Rainy with the “Assignment done” news. He also communicated his resignation. “I’m leaving a little reminder why it’s best not to follow me,” read the cryptic last line. He frankly could care less if they ever discovered what happened to Blair.

  With keys taken from Blair, he commandeered the man’s SUV. After all, I don’t think he’s going to need it anymore, he thought. As he rolled through the gate, he pulled out a small transmitter and pushed the button. Behind him, the King Air exploded with a fireball soaring in the sky and a thunder reverberating off the surrounding mountains. It was his resignation punctuation. Also, his warning not to bother following. For the first time in years, he hummed some almost forgotten reggae music as he drove into the night.

  #

  Chapter 19

  Truth Shall Set You Free

  May 2017

  This was supposed to be a less traveled trail taking Sander into the valley where they captured Mariana. At least that’s what showed on the USGS map he was following. But from Sander’s point of view, it could best be described as a faint deer path. More than once he had to cast around to find where it continued after a long stretch of exposed granite obscured the path. He just kept putting his boots forward.

  To keep him going in the right direction, he relied on his geocaching experience and an old handheld GPS he bought from a Pacific Crest Trail hiker wintering over at Tahoe. Unless NetSecure and its government cronies had established surveillance to monitor anyone visiting Mariana’s capture site, he thought he would be pretty safe. He reasoned, It would be a long shot waste of resources on their part. He took GPS readings as necessary to keep him on track and acted like just another backpacker in the rugged high Sierra wilderness.

  He halted to adjust his pack and take a sip of water. Around him, the brilliant blue sky stretched unencumbered by clouds. The trail made long zigzags against the steep eastern face of a sharp-edged peak. In the welcome shade of a small clump of dwarf firs making a perilous living at this altitude, he turned and looked back and out. The view stretched for miles. Way down below were tree-rimmed alpine lakes nestled in the valley. Looking further out, snow-painted peaks stretched into the distance, all carved by the glaciers that ground through these mountains.

  If anything else but a sense of loss, duty, and revenge motivated his hike, he could have taken the time to enjoy the isolation three days of mountain travel had won. Instead, he focused on getting over this last pass. At ninety-four hundred feet, not inconsequential, and on the other side lay his destination.

  ***

  Sander now went by Winston Smith. He had made his way out of the mountains to the North Shore of Lake Tahoe; an aging resort area with a lot of transients, servicing the skiers in winter and the vacationers in summer. He had fit right in, renting a single room cabin that was more of an insulated former garage with a bath and hot plate. All paid for with cash obtained through odd jobs. Always playing it low-key and unobtrusive, not going out much.

  Remembering Mariana’s lessons, he avoided owning a connected device. No computer or phone. His only access to the Internet had been anonymous, through the local library's public access system, where he varied his days and access times and always kept a sharp eye out for surveillance.

  Whenever he used the Library’s computers, he put a piece of tape over the monitor's built-in camera. He made sure to never search for anything related to his old life or Mariana’s. No emails to former friends or colleagues. Sander Bonham had fallen off the face of the earth when he dropped off of the trestle. So far, his Winston Smith identity had held up.

  It had been an eventful winter. He hunted through local newspapers and found an article describing Mariana’s death. It said she rented the Jeep at the South Lake Tahoe Airport, and it had happened on a twisty Sierra Nevada Highway, close to Tahoe. The driver had lost control early in the dark morning hours. The SUV had parted a metal barrier and gone over a cliff. Ice on the road, announced the sheriff’s office as the official reason. The accident set off a small fire when the Jeep landed, incinerating the interior.

  The story said Mariana was the passenger. Her corpse identified through dental records. The identity of the driver was not provided by the authorities. Speculation centered on it being her traveling companion, Sander Bonham. He’d gone missing at the time of the accident. Sources linked the two of them. The investigation was ongoing.

  Reading this, Sander had felt numb. Until that moment, he’d kept alive a sliver of hope. That somehow he could find her. That somehow they could be together. His world shattered and he drifted for weeks in a fog of pain, anger, and loss.

  Also came death on a national level; three liberal Supreme Court Justices killed by a domestic, homegrown, alt-right terrorist. President Ravana was going to have a chance to pack the Court. An ultra-conservative Congress had returned along with the president. That same Congress advocated draconian surveillance laws in reaction to the national tragedy.

  The NSA's Utah data center, the world's biggest, had been upgraded and was online to help with the ramp in monitoring. The president was requesting funding for even larger facilities to meet the
growing threat.

  Several prominent leadership Democrats fell to online scandals such as underage sexting or mistress emails, leaving the party tied in knots over their replacements. Several others had reversed long-standing positions and, in an extraordinary show of bipartisanship—that President Ravana took credit for—started to espouse the new administration's views. Ravana held sway over Congress like few others before him, and none in the modern age. With the country rallied behind him in the face of the assassinations, he was unstoppable.

  Sander knew his voice alone would not be the one to bring the fraud down; no news organization was going to listen to his story. Come on, he thought, the most powerful president in generations stole the election through digital legerdemain and, when we found out about it, tried to have both of us killed? She is dead, and I've completely disappeared because I'm worried about staying alive. We’re off of the playing board, and they've moved on to bigger and better things. At best, if I go public, I'm fodder for the conspiracy blogs, noticed by the wrong sorts and will have some rough weather in my future.

  ***

  It was several days after his dive off the trestle before he was able to evade any hunters and make it out of the mountains. It was a couple of days after that before he could get access to email. By then a week had passed and he was anxious to see if she had sent anything. He finally read her email on the shared account where they had agreed to leave messages. He found it waiting:

  I don't know if you are alive or not. But I wanted you to know; I never wanted to be Big Brother and am ashamed of how my work has been perverted. My happiest times have been in your arms. 35672233354467541523894533864655763298653456332784352439697251373587

  He gained some comfort from her last text, but was left with the mystery of what really happened to her, and the numbers. He knew it was a code and could not recall any key she may have shared. Something he could know and not the NSA, with its vast resources. It drove him crazy. For weeks, he obsessed. He read everything the library had on puzzles and codes. He spent time researching the same thing online when he got time on the library’s system. All of his free time became focused on deciphering her last cipher.

  It took months for him to stumble on the answer. One day, when walking out of the library, he saw a copy of 1984 on the return shelf. It triggered the memory of their breakup, and his parting gift. It had been the only book he’d ever given her. Something unique to only them, he thought, something we had in common. He recalled seeing it in her train compartment and feeling pleased she valued it enough to keep it with her.

  It had been mid-afternoon when the inspiration hit, and fortunately demand was weak for the public computers. A fellow dishwasher from a couple of jobs ago was using one to video chat with his family in New Zealand, oblivious to anything outside of his screen. Sander sat down and began a search of Google’s Library Project.

  It was a special first edition of 1984 he needed, and his luck held. Google had scanned the specific book and it was waiting for him online. He remembered Mariana’s talk about how the old ways were best if they wanted to remain hidden. Something like a book code could keep the message secure.

  He felt like the idiot she’d often called him. It brought a smile with the memory. But it was now clear to him. Pulling up the book, he brought out the numbers she left. He stopped a moment to recall the conversation from months ago. They had talked about a lot of things in those weeks. Especially about her distrust of secrets. Fortunately, her instructions for reading such a code came back to him.

  He made short work of the decoding, and the message opened up to him. The result had been simple. 3964344N76461476W. Years of geocaching deciphered this to read as coordinates, 39° 6' 43.44° North Latitude 76° 46' 14.76° West Longitude. She’d marked something's position.

  Staying off of the net so a search for this set of coordinates would not be left behind, he used the library’s map section and got a location just above the valley where they had run into trouble. He needed to find out why she wanted him there. The Sierra's snows had been deep that year and had blanketed whatever she’d left behind. It was now spring, and he needed to go for a hike.

  ***

  Sander wore dark shades to protect his eyes as he climbed the pass. The bright mountain sun came with thin air, and his lungs worked hard as they tried to find precious oxygen. His crampons gave a reassuring crunch and, more importantly, a solid feel, as they dug into the icy snow. He could see the top of the pass a short distance ahead. Once over he would be at the head of Mariana’s valley.

  Cresting the peak, he came down the other side and found a beautiful round mountain lake with a dramatic escarpment of granite rising behind it. A classic Sierra landscape. The high alpine trees stepped well back from the water's edge. The ground around the lakeside littered with scree left behind by the retreating glacier. The lake's still water perfectly reflected the surrounding sky and mountains, undeniably beautiful.

  Sander thought, Not the easiest place to find a hidden object, just too many rocks to turn over. Mariana knew unfriendly folks might be searching for this too, so she could not be overt. I’ve got all this going for me.

  The coordinates led him to this general spot; it was up to him to find the trove once there, so he put away the GPS and began thinking through his search. When orienting, he always enjoyed this final part of the hunt, trying to place himself into the mind of the other person hiding the cache from those who came seeking.

  Sometimes you just have to brute force a problem, he remembered with a smile. He started to turn over rocks. Twenty minutes later he found it, under several rocks tumbled together like all of their brothers and sisters at these coordinates.

  He instantly recognized the old Faraday coat when he lifted the flat rock covering a little vault. It had come through the winter in remarkably good shape; wrapped around two nested plastic bags, enclosing Mariana’s cross necklace with her secret data fob. Placing it here had been one of the last things she’d done, and he respected her resourcefulness in reaching beyond her death. On the hike back out, he spent his time imagining what she’d possibly left him.

  ***

  Mariana’s fob was not something he could trust to the library's computer without checking it first. He needed to open it in a more private and secure setting. Craigslist came to the rescue and enabled him to buy an aging laptop by parting with the remainder of his cash. With rent coming due next week, this was a risky decision, but he needed to know what she had left. It took him time to walk to the bar where the deal went down, and his anxiety to learn the secret of the fob increased with each step.

  Back at his cabin later that afternoon, he laid the sticker-covered computer on the room's only table. He crudely disabled its cellular modem, but did not know if the system’s radio frequency emissions were powerful enough to be monitored. On the better safe than sorry theory, he found himself huddled with the computer under the Faraday coat like a protective blanket. Even if they were monitoring all RF emissions in the Tahoe Basin, he felt reasonably secure. The fob clicked into the USB slot, and its icon appeared on his screen.

  He wondered what he would find; this was Mariana’s legacy. He remembered her alluding to the AI, but how could she code anything meaningful in such a short space of time? Would he find a file she wanted published? Her warning to the world? Would he find Armageddon?

  He nervously clicked on the fob’s icon and two files appeared, a document titled “Read Me First”, and a ZIP file titled “Hope”. He maneuvered his mouse and clicked on “Read Me First”. He reflected, She must have had this ready to go for a while if she’d been able to grab it and go. After months and miles, her final message appeared on his screen:

  Dear Sander,

  It sounds trite, but if you are reading this, I'm gone. Completely. Forever.

  But I have a legacy. I did it. I've atoned for my mistakes and created Hope.

  In a world where others can pierce our fragile digital privacy shells and use the i
nformation gained to further themselves at our expense; there is no privacy.

  We can create a new world, without secrets, where there can be no hidden manipulation.

  If everyone is to have a chance, you have to install Hope. It's not going to be easy, but we are so close to losing freedom forever.

  Let me describe what’ll happen when Hope wakes up. By the way, she is a big file and will take some time to upload, but she’s an amazing AI and deserves a name.

  She'll spread out and hide in a thousand server farms, millions of phones, and a billion devices on the Internet of things. She’ll put down deep roots into the fabric of the global network.

  By the time anyone notices, it’s going to require dismantling the world's digital infrastructure to get rid of her, and who is going to allow that to happen? Is the world ready for the equivalent of a global electromagnetic pulse wiping out every computer and every phone?

  Our little girl is going to have a very persistent state.

  She then begins her second and most critical phase. She has a limited and direct purpose; she will override every search engine and add a unique capability. You can ask for anything, and if there is a digital record of it somewhere, you’ll get the data.

  Anyone can know anything about anybody at any time.

  If she senses danger from those harming her capabilities, then she will crash the entire Internet. A self-destruct system that hopefully will keep governments from trying to kill her.

  If anyone were to do this, then she reemerges from her digital seeds once their systems are reconnected, and resumes her place. Even rebuilding from fresh silicon will be impossible. She will be that deeply embedded.