But then the investigation went sideways. One witness recanted his affidavit, claiming that he had been coerced into making a false statement. Another fell ill and could not be interviewed. Requests for information from ONE went unanswered. Subpoenas were challenged. It was a classic case of stonewalling. But instead of pressing harder, which was the FBI’s normal modus operandi, the Bureau backed off. A memo from Fergus Keefe to Joe and Randy Bell requested that they terminate the investigation. Both men objected, but to no avail. A week later John Merriweather perished in a plane crash and the case was officially closed. The sale to ONE Technologies was approved shortly thereafter.
There was more to it than that, as Harold Stark had made sure that Joe would find out. With a mixture of anger and disbelief, Mary read through a series of e-mails from Ian Prince to Edward Mason requesting that the FBI’s deputy director “tamp down” the Merriweather investigation. Lobbying on Ian’s behalf was the director of the NSA, who called ONE’s acquisition of Merriweather and the forthcoming Titan supercomputer “paramount to ensuring the continued supremacy of United States intelligence- and data-gathering efforts around the world.” Mason responded that so far the investigation had not turned up sufficient evidence to indicate criminal wrongdoing, and he would do his utmost to bring the case to a quick and favorable conclusion.
At this Mary offered a disgusted expletive. When did a sitting deputy director of the FBI offer any kind of comment to the CEO of a company it was investigating? she asked Tank. Let alone promise that he would aid in shutting the investigation down?
A moment later they discovered the reason. They found the smoking gun: an e-mail from Ian Prince to Edward Mason confirming the transfer of $10 million to a numbered account in Liechtenstein of which Mason was the sole beneficiary.
“Ten million,” said Tank. “That buys a lot of margaritas.”
“Ian Prince must have wanted Merriweather pretty badly.”
“I’m beginning to guess why.”
“Titan?”
He nodded grimly.
Setting the tablet on her lap, Mary opened the Titan folder. Not e-mails and documents this time, but complex computer engineering schematics. Diagrams showing the layout and manufacture of Titan’s internal components, many with significant sections highlighted in yellow and words like bypass, backdoor, override. To a layman the plans were as incomprehensible as they were impressive. Aware of this, Hal Stark had provided a one-page explanation for the common man.
“It’s the mother lode,” said Tank after they’d finished reading. “He’s got it all. Hook, line, and sinker.”
“Do people in the government know he’s modified their computers?”
“No chance. I don’t think they’d appreciate Ian Prince looking over their shoulders.”
Mary laid her head back and sighed.
“Look at this,” said Tank after a minute. “From Mason to Prince. It’s about Joe.”
Mary snapped to attention. In the message Mason warned Prince that a secret task force had been established by Dylan Walsh, the chief of the FBI’s Cyber Investigations Division, to look into ONE’s hacking of the FBI’s servers for six months during the company’s takeover of Merriweather Systems. The task force was named Semaphore.
“Joe was investigating ONE all the time,” said Tank. “He knew exactly what Prince was up to.”
“You got your story.”
“Story? I’ve got a book,” said Tank. “But I’ll start with a story. How’s this for a lead: ‘Last December, Edward Mason, deputy director of the FBI, received a ten-million-dollar payment from Ian Prince, founder and chief executive officer of ONE Technologies, to a numbered account at the National Bank of Liechtenstein in exchange for halting the FBI’s investigation into charges against the company of extortion and shareholder intimidation relating to its takeover of Merriweather Systems’?”
“Sounds good.”
“Front page. Above the fold.”
Mary was looking back at the Merriweather folder. “There’s something we missed.”
“What is it?”
“Something a lot worse than extortion.” Mary moved the cursor onto the icon for a document inside the Merriweather folder titled “Crash.”
The document ran to one page and was a screenshot of computer code. At the top, a single line of clarification: “Malware used against John Merriweather’s on-board navigation system (serial number XXX77899). Installed 12/15 by Ian Prince.”
Mary looked up. “You said that John Merriweather flew his plane into the side of a mountain. Pilot error.”
“Apparently not.”
“Your story just got a lot better.” She checked her watch and stood, shocked at the time. “I have to go. My flight leaves at seven-fifty-five.”
“Hold on,” said Tank. “You still have five minutes. Let’s take a look at Orca.”
And five minutes was all they needed to learn about Ian Prince’s plans to construct the largest supertanker ever built. Not even a supertanker, really, but an island, by the look of the elevations provided. An island with homes for a few thousand people, factories, offices, an airstrip, a beach, its own nuclear power plant, and, every bit as impressive, rising directly in its center, a mountain. An island or a ship or something entirely new.
“Why did Stark name the file Orca?” Mary asked.
“Because he’s a bit of a joker. Orca’s the name of the shark fisherman’s boat in Jaws,” said Tank. “The movie. Don’t you remember what Roy Scheider says when he and Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss are way out in the middle of the ocean and he first sees the shark?”
“No,” said Mary. “I don’t.”
“ ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat.’ ” Tank put down the tablet. “Ian Prince built himself the biggest boat ever.”
“What kind of shark is he afraid of?”
Tank shrugged and pulled himself off the couch. “Time for you to skedaddle.”
“I can’t drive that thing. Even if I could, I couldn’t. The police will be looking everywhere for it.”
“Take my truck. It’s out in the shed. Keys are in the ignition.”
“And you?”
“I’ll find a way back into town.”
Mary stood and walked with him to the door. “We did good,” she said.
“Your husband did good. But our work won’t be done till we get that story to the paper.”
“Isn’t there a way we can send over all the files?”
“No connection out here. No cell service. No wireless. Like I said—”
“ ‘Off the grid.’ ”
“Yep.”
Mary kissed Tank on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I told you, I’m in this game for myself. Now go get your daughter.”
Mary stepped outside and crossed the yard to a ramshackle shed. The truck was an old Ford, even more beat-up than the Jeep, with manual transmission and springs pushing through the worn-out seats. The engine turned over on the first try. She stopped in front of the cabin. “Write your story.”
“Our story,” said Tank.
Mary put the truck into drive and headed down the dirt road. A wind had picked up and filled the cabin with the scent of thistle and loam. In the rearview mirror she saw Tank waving. She thought he was calling to her. She wasn’t sure, but it sounded as if he was saying something about a buggy whip.
84
“Mine.”
Its official name was the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, though it was better known as simply the Utah Data Center. And it sat on 240 acres carved from the hillside directly above Highway 71, between the town of Bluffdale and Salt Lake City.
No measures had been taken to hide the facility. Four data halls measuring 100,000 square feet and built parallel to one another housed the thousands of servers necessary to store the oceans of data it collected. The halls were serviced by a dedicated cooling station. An on-site power plant provided the
compound’s electricity. To the naked eye it looked like nothing more glamorous than a giant Walmart or Costco or Target distribution center, the kind of gargantuan bland warehouses that lined highways in rural areas all over the United States.
And it belonged to the National Security Agency, which was to say that it belonged to the combined intelligence establishment of the United States of America.
After the successful demonstration of ONE’s Titan supercomputer, it would belong to Ian Prince.
—
“This is it,” said Bob Goldfarb, the Emperor’s gnomish assistant. “Time to see what all those exaflops get us.”
“Like a hammer on a walnut,” said Ian. “AES doesn’t stand a chance.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Goldfarb, eyes twinkling with dreams of world domination. “And so does the president.”
Not all of the Utah Data Center was visible to the naked eye. The Operations Room sat inside a nuclear-hardened concrete bunker three hundred feet below the surface. It was a SCIF inside a SCIF, with floor-to-ceiling monitors on the walls, rows of analysts’ workstations, flags standing in the corners.
This morning the Operations Room was filled to capacity, seats taken by a mix of government and military personnel, the overflow lining the walls. The briefing was beyond top-secret or ultra top-secret or whatever was the latest term for the highest security clearance in the land. The vice president was present and stood with his coterie next to General Terry Wolfe. Even the president was in attendance, if from two thousand miles away, joining them along with the national security adviser and the director of the CIA from the Situation Room beneath the White House.
Ian stood against the back wall, arms crossed. He’d left Briggs in the visitors’ lounge, along with a dozen other high-ranking officers and officials who did not possess adequate clearance. Ian was part of the brain trust. General Wolfe called him his own Oppenheimer. While others theorized, Ian had built the damned thing.
Seventy years ago a similar group had gathered in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, to gaze at a round object perched atop a tall tower and bear witness to the first atomic explosion in the history of mankind. Fat Man and Little Boy were but a black-and-white memory. The new kid on the block was named Titan.
The NSA had purchased it for but one purpose: to decrypt information culled from the deep Web, or Deepnet—the part of the Internet invisible to the common man. The Deepnet included all passwordprotected data, both government and commercial; all U.S. and foreign government communications; and all noncommercial file sharing between trusted peers. The problem had never been collecting the information. With sieves at every transit point in every communications hub on earth, the NSA was capable of collecting all it wanted. The problem was decryption.
All data found on the Deepnet was encrypted according to the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, a theoretically unbreakable shell encasing each message to protect it from intruding eyes and to ensure that only the intended recipient read it. To date, no machine had been able to crack the AES in anything close to a quick and efficient manner.
Titan would change that.
Titan, with its enormous processing power, its gargantuan intellect, its unfathomable speed, could break any code within seconds. Titan was the hammer to AES’s shell. One blow, and crack! The shell would disintegrate.
Ian could see by the skeptical expressions that few present this morning believed Titan would work. Ian had no doubt. He knew.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please.” General Terry Wolfe stood at the front of the room, fussing with his eyeglasses. “We’ve gathered here today to witness the first operational test of the new Titan supercomputer. We’re going to start with an intercept we pulled down from our friends in Moscow. Judging from the format, it looks like it’s from FSB director Gromov to a counterpart in Kiev. We’ve been at it for two days now and we can’t crack the shell.” A nod to a technician. “Go ahead. Let’s see what Titan can do.”
The technician fed the intercept into Titan. Lines of encrypted code flooded the main screen: letters, symbols, numerals, a seemingly random mishmash. The word Processing flashed at the bottom as Titan ran the message through multiple decryption programs simultaneously.
“Two days and we can’t make head nor tail of it,” whispered Goldfarb. “Not all the bright Russians are working for Google.”
Ian stared at the screen, hands clasped behind his back, as the seconds ticked by. A minute passed, and then another. Someone cleared his throat. A chair slid across the floor. There was a cough. Reports of Titan’s superpowers had been overrated.
“At least you got the heat issue fixed,” said Goldfarb. “That’s a start.”
Someone said, “Hey!”
A hush swept the room.
“Here we go,” said the Emperor.
Ian didn’t alter his expression as the mishmash of letters, symbols, and numerals was replaced line by line with a message, not only decrypted but translated into flawless English.
From: Yuri Gromov, Director, FSB
Recipient: Boris Klitschko, President, Ukraine
Text: In regards to the premier’s upcoming visit, he has asked that you have ten kilos American dry-aged filet per day on hand to be prepared medium rare, sliced thinly, and served to Ivan at 6 a.m., 1 p.m., and 8 p.m. promptly. There will be an afternoon snack of one kilo steak tartare. Ivan also requires at least five cashmere blankets and two veal shank bones with marrow.
“Who the hell’s Ivan?” It was the president, asking from the Situation Room.
“I believe it’s his dog,” said the CIA director. “An Irish wolfhound.”
Laughter all around.
Ian felt a presence at his side. He looked over to see the vice president glaring at him. “So we built a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar data center employing the world’s most advanced supercomputer to learn what the Russian premier’s dog likes to eat.”
The vice president had long opposed the expansion of the secret state and was a vocal opponent of the Utah Data Center.
The laughter died.
“Happy, Mr. Prince?” he whispered. “Get to add another zero to your fortune. You guys are all snake-oil salesmen. Only your gadget can save the world. Give me a break. What are we supposed to do with all this stuff, anyway?”
“I think you’re missing the point,” said Ian. “It isn’t what’s in the message, it’s the fact that we were able to read it.”
The vice president turned his attention to the Emperor. “Anything else up your sleeve, General Wolfe?” he barked.
The NSA director fidgeted as he adjusted his eyeglasses yet again. “Impress us, Dave,” he said to an air force colonel seated nearby.
“Yessir.” Dave punched away at his keys. Voices played over the loudspeaker. Ian recognized the language as Mandarin, but a northern dialect. A translation of the conversation appeared in real time on the main screen.
“The meeting began fifteen minutes ago,” said someone identified only as Speaker 1. “The vice president, the director of the National Security Agency, and many other government functionaries are in attendance. Pictures show that sixteen vehicles arrived at the site in the last hour. We believe they are testing the new hardware that was recently installed.”
“What is it?” said Speaker 2. “Titan?”
“We are not yet certain, but most probably it is a more sophisticated processing apparatus.”
“Are we at risk?”
“Absolutely not. No one can penetrate our systems.”
“Gentlemen, we are listening to a general at the Chinese Ministry of State Security in Beijing speaking to China’s vice premier, over a secure, encrypted line. Normally it would take us several hours to break the encryption, if we could at all. As we are all witnesses, the translation is real-time. It seems, Mr. President, that the Chinese are talking about us. They are discussing the demonstration of Titan. Here. Today. Now. The pictures they are referring to come from one of their spy satellites loo
king down on us from a few hundred miles up. In effect we are spying on our enemies spying on us—and we are having a better time of it.”
In the Situation Room, the president did nothing to hide his pride. “And it’s these new machines that are enabling this?” asked the vice president.
“Yessir,” said Wolfe. “It is. Here’s another we have queued up. This conversation began three minutes ago and is continuing.”
This time it was Arabic voices, but the translation was as timely and accurate as before. Wolfe explained that the group was listening in on a conversation between the Saudi Arabian minister of defense and a man named Mohammed Fawzi, an Algerian who headed up Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
“My forces are being decimated,” said Fawzi. “We have nowhere to hide.”
“Patience, my friend,” said the Saudi.
“Fuck patience. Time is an expensive commodity. We need money to purchase it, money for better communications equipment, for more safe houses, and to pay men to take the place of those martyred.”
“The king will make his usual contribution.”
“Five million dollars isn’t enough. I need at least ten if we are to continue with Paris as the king wishes.”
“The king does not like Paris. He was asked to leave a hotel there once. The Meurice. It is owned by Jews. You must continue with Paris.”
Wolfe killed the feed. “Please be aware that the Central Intelligence Agency has been in the loop about Paris for some time now.”
The vice president raised a hand to summon the room’s attention. “Just one question,” he said. “If you guys can listen to the Chinese all the way in Shanghai or Beijing or wherever the hell they are, and to Al-Qaeda wherever the hell they are, and everyone’s talking on secure and encrypted links, what’s to stop you from listening in on the president when he’s talking to the British prime minister over our own secure encrypted link?”
“Yes,” echoed the president. “How do I know you won’t be listening to me?”
Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Page 31
