Blue Warrior

by Mike Maden

  It was impossible to be around Pearce and not feel like a man was in the room. Solid, dependable, masculine. The kind of man who would fight and die for his country, a rare breed these days. The kind of man who would defend a woman’s honor and her life, whether in a bar fight or a firefight. There weren’t many of those left, either. Video games and boy bands and androgynous movie actors were feminizing everything. In the current culture, the masculine was pitifully obsolete, testosterone an environmental hazard.

  Myers poured herself another cup of coffee and gathered her wits. Enough dawdling. Time to get to work. Ian’s package that had been delivered to her at the Glory Box café by Sadie contained all of the necessary keys for Pearce’s cabin and vehicles, along with the alarm code passwords she needed. Pearce had left instructions with Ian that he was to give Myers any and all support she needed should she ever require it. Myers had offered Pearce and his team much the same, though in her capacity as a hands-off owner of a private software company, there wasn’t much she could bring to the table compared with the resources available to Pearce Systems.

  She began the terminal session on Pearce’s Linus desktop by plugging in the flash drive Ian sent her and followed his script exactly. Moments later she was tunneling on Ian’s encrypted virtual private network (VPN). Ian’s VPN operated in the Dark Net where 97 percent of all Web content was located and yet was mostly inaccessible to the billions of online users. The Surface Web where people used Google and Facebook was only a tiny fraction of the online world. While some black market vendors hid in the netherworld of the Dark Net in order to sell illegal or contraband items, legitimate users, like lan, just didn’t want to be found.

  Myers established a secure videoconferencing connection to Ian, who was located in the renovated Mercury auto plant in Dearborn, Michigan, that served as Pearce Systems’ headquarters and primary research facility.

  “Hello, Ian. It’s nice to finally meet you in person, sort of.”

  “Same here, Madame President. I’m glad you made it safely.”

  “Please, call me Margaret. We’re going to be working together.”

  “Of course. Are you comfortable?”

  Myers saw herself in the smaller conferencing window wearing Pearce’s shirt. It must have seemed presumptuous. Maybe even Freudian.

  “I’m quite comfortable, thank you. The cabin is rustic but charming.”

  “I believe his grandfather built it.”

  “It has a lot of character. And good coffee.”

  “I have you under surveillance on my end. You might care to activate the local security monitors as well, just to be safe.”

  Myers scanned the bank of monitors over the desk. Security camera images covering the entire compound filled the screens. There were also cameras rotating shots room to room inside the cabin. “Already did.”

  “Very good. Have you had a chance to inspect the motor home?”

  “Briefly. It looks like something out of Star Wars.” She had already checked out Pearce’s mobile command center. She knew Pearce had run many of his ops remotely from the retrofitted vehicle.

  “You may need to access it later, but for now the terminal you’re on will suffice. Perhaps we should begin at the beginning. Please tell me why you needed a secure location.”

  Myers gave a brief explanation of her visit to Justice Tanner and his subsequent suicide, along with the strong suspicion that she was being watched by whoever had blackmailed him.

  “What evidence do you have of blackmail?”

  “I knew the man for twenty years. His suicide was both an apology and, I think, a clue.”

  “Clue?”

  “He was very nervous and hostile when I met with him. I’ve never known him to be either. Whoever had the power to blackmail him probably had the ability to keep him under surveillance. I think that’s why he was nervous and hostile. Probably trying to protect me, though I didn’t see it at the time. If he had been blackmailed he couldn’t say anything to me if he was under surveillance, so I believe he might have killed himself in order to invite an investigation.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, that’s a bit of a stretch.”

  “Maybe. But he seemed to bear the weight of an enormous amount of guilt for violating his own principles. The weight of history, too. His controversial opinion will be read and criticized for as long as there are law books.”

  “So his death could be the result of guilt, but the basis of a clue. That makes sense, though it would hardly stand up in a court of law.”

  “I initiated a few search queries two days ago. My own security measures indicated that I was being monitored. Without question, I know I’m on the right path. I’m determined to find out who is behind his death.”

  “Do you have a course of action in mind?”

  “Yes, and I’m going to need your help. We need to start digging, but we need to do it in a very secure way; otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll both be targeted by the same people who came after Vin. I’m willing to take the risk, but I won’t put you or Pearce Systems in jeopardy.”

  “No worries there. This is what we do. Where do we start?”

  “I always start with a simple question. Who benefits?” Myers knew the K Street game well enough to know that changes in legislation and regulation could be even more profitable than just simple cash transfers. Politicians and lobbyists—many of whom were former politicians—were obvious candidates.

  Wall Street banksters and hedge fund managers would have also benefitted from the ruling, and that would be another place to start. But something told Myers that was too obvious. The sophistication of the malware that tried to infect her motherboard’s BIOS suggested more advanced software abilities than the average stockbroker usually possessed.

  On the other hand, a few Wall Street firms hired the best mathematicians and software engineers to create and execute blindingly fast investing algorithms—“robo-traders” or “algos”—that made faster, better, and emotionless computer-generated trades in milliseconds throughout global markets. Often utilizing high-speed data (HSD) sold to them by the exchanges themselves, institutional investors made billions in high-frequency trading. HFT was responsible for at least half if not more of all Wall Street transactions these days, turning massive profits on fractional stock movements, or legally “front-running” trades made by slower investors. Profits, like war, depended on beating opponents to the punch. Speed was everything, and no human trader could ever hope to keep up with the automated systems. The same would be true in war, Myers feared. Automated generals and admirals could eliminate future conflicts by displaying their drone squadrons and rebotic fleets more swiftly and decisively than their human counterparts.

  Of course, all of that data harvesting and processing relied heavily on hardware and software systems. When the algorithms failed, “flash crashes” and other high-speed-data train wrecks occurred. But billions of dollars in profits were being harvested by these “drone” trading systems. They also had to be protected by sophisticated hardware and software security systems in order to safely conduct billions of financial transactions every day, accurately and securely. So, yes, there were Wall Street suspects, too, along with the politicians and lobbyists. Come to think of it, a number of Wall Street figures were also former politicians and lobbyists. In fact, they were all interchangeable parts of the same vast machine. This would be a difficult knot to try to untangle.

  “Let’s talk about this for a moment,” Myers said. She drummed her fingers on the desktop. “Tanner made an outrageous legal decision. Thousands, if not millions, of people stand to profit in some way from it—some more than others. A few of those would have benefitted the most, so they would have had the most to gain. But the outrageousness of the decision tells me that the leverage they had over him must have been unbelievable. Big decision, big threat, big payoff. Make sense?”

  “Impe
ccable logic.”

  “But what could the deep, dark secret have been? Tanner would have been vetted for every significant position he ever held, including the Colorado Supreme Court, but even before he was formally nominated to the United States Supreme Court, we had the FBI conduct a standard background check. So either Tanner did something terribly wrong after he was confirmed to his appointment, or something he had done was very ancient and very well hidden. The first scenario speaks to ongoing surveillance, and the latter to extreme research capabilities, don’t you agree?”

  “Agreed. In either scenario, government resources most likely would be needed.”

  “Or a government contractor.”

  “Or it could have been a stroke of bad luck that someone happened to stumble across something.”

  “That’s like saying someone stumbled across buried treasure. No, you have to dig for buried treasure, and the bigger the treasure, the deeper you hide it. Besides, I don’t know how to write an algorithm for luck. If I did, I’d use it to play Powerball, wouldn’t you?”

  “Another possibility would be faked evidence of some sort.”

  “You didn’t know Vin Tanner,” Myers said. “If someone had ginned up fake evidence, he’d fight tooth and nail against it.”

  “Unless the false evidence was so well documented that he knew he couldn’t fight against it, or worse, maybe he even believed it.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “You know, something like ‘Here is a picture of you with this person when you were drunk. You just don’t remember doing this terrible thing with them because you were so drunk.’ Most people believe visual evidence, even if it contradicts their beliefs. It’s so easy to fake photographs these days. It’s very difficult to trust anything digital.”

  “I agree. Faked evidence is a possibility. But I still believe we’re talking about a government agency or government contractor. But you know government people. They all talk. So if the word never got out about this, then it must have been a very small operation.”

  “Rogue perhaps?”

  “Not authorized, for sure. At least, not legally.”

  “Where does that leave us?” Ian asked.

  “A few people who stood to most benefit from a single, outrageous decision utilized one or a few highly capable research and/or surveillance people to find or create blackmail data on Justice Tanner. So at least the numbers of actual participants seems to be shrinking. But the number of candidates is still huge, counting just high-ranking politicians and Wall Street CEOs. Let’s try two tacks. First, can you put together some sort of search query about outrageous decisions?”

  “That’s a rather indefinable and unquantifiable search parameter, don’t you think?”

  “We can attack it in two ways. First, we can tackle this from a political angle. We can look at all committee and subcommittee hearings, selecting out those focused on big-budget items like defense or regulations that affect big financial institutions.”

  “I am a stranger in a strange land, but I believe there are many such committees and subcommittees in your Congress.”

  “Okay, I’ll make it easy on you. The Ways and Means Committees in both the House and Senate are responsible for the tax laws. They also happen to be the most powerful and coveted of all committee appointments. Those are the two biggest fish to catch as far as lobbyists are concerned. Finance, Banking, Commerce, Energy, and Defense would be the other big ones—all of their subcommittees, too. Those committee votes are all legal documents that are in the public domain and easily pulled down. In the case of legal decisions, limit the pool to federal appellate and Supreme Court decisions. And let’s limit our search to just the last three years.”

  “Just?” Ian laughed.

  “The second way to attack this is to define ‘outrageous decisions’ as those that have resonated strongly with the attentive public. So we’ll conduct high-frequency word searches limited to a distinct vocabulary—words like ‘inexplicable,’ ‘indefensible,’ et cetera—and look for those on the top twenty political, financial, and military blogs, Twitter feeds, and what have you, to see what decisions have most outraged the attentive public that uses those sites.”

  “We are still dealing with tens of thousands of decisions.”

  “Not really. Remember, we’re only looking for the most outrageous. The real outliers. I think we’re talking hundreds, or maybe just dozens, of such extremely controversial votes. Of course, if we don’t come up with anything, we can widen the search. Unfortunately, federal bureaucracies write thousands of administrative laws every year that are every bit as binding as any piece of congressional legislation. But let’s not go there yet.”

  “Thank heavens.”

  “So the idea is this. If we can find the most outrageous political decisions and then find out which person or persons most benefitted from most of those decisions, I think we’ll have a pretty good pool of suspects to look into.”

  “Most benefitted?”

  “Let’s quantify that, and let’s just focus on money for now. Let’s set a figure of ten million dollars. If someone didn’t profit at least ten million, don’t keep them in our pool. The kind of hostile surveillance and research operations we’re theorizing about would cost a lot of money. Anything less than ten million is chump change in Washington.”

  “I should think that any politician that suddenly increased their net worth by ten million dollars in a few years would make headlines.”

  “You’d be surprised. There are more millionaires in Congress than nonmillionaires these days. And some of them are worth far, far more. But I take your point. We’re probably talking about corporations, private trusts, hedge funds. But just in case a political person is behind this, we should target those financial institutions with C-level managers married to the members of committees or courts we talked about.”

  “Good thing I don’t have a private life,” Ian said.

  “I’m terribly sorry. I know I’m asking a lot, but whoever drove Tanner to kill himself is now out for me. And if they can take out a Supreme Court justice and possibly a former U.S. president, I have to believe they are a threat to other members of the government, and maybe not just this government.”

  “Quite right. It is an honor and a privilege to work with you on this. I really wasn’t whinging, I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  They worked out the specifics in the arcane and mysterious language of computer programmers, then divided up the responsibilities. Myers would work from the safety of Pearce’s cabin and Ian would do his part from Pearce Systems headquarters, so long as Troy didn’t require his services. Myers agreed, secretly hoping that Pearce wouldn’t need Ian’s assistance, because if he did, that meant Troy was in trouble and she was in no position to do anything about it, and that infuriated her.

  27

  The village of Anou

  Kidal Region, Northeastern Mali

  7 May

  I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just haul out of here?”

  “We’re out of fuel. We wouldn’t get twenty kilometers,” Mossa said.

  “You should’ve thought about that before you—”

  “You arrogant bastard. What do you know about our situation?” Cella’s eyes were blue coals.

  “We planned on refueling here, but the Ganda Koy drained the tanks into the sand,” Mike said. “So we’re stuck.”

  “With the army on the way?” Pearce said. “You guys aren’t stuck. You’re fucked.”

  “Save my daughter. Please,” Cella said.

  Pearce ran his fingers through his long hair, thinking. He hated being lied to. Hated being in the middle of another war on a piece of ground that wasn’t worth pissing on. Hated the whole situation. But it is what it is, he finally concluded.

  “All right, fine. We’ll take the girl,” Pearce said.

/>   Mossa nodded his thanks.

  “We can crowd a dozen of your men on the plane,” he added.

  “No. Our fight is here. And even if we came with you, the minute we landed in Niger we would be arrested. Better to die as free men than live as slaves in a Nigerien salt mine.”

  “Then let’s quit jawboning and roll,” Pearce said.

  “Thank you,” Cella said, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’ll get her now.”

  Pearce tapped his comms. “Judy, we’re on the way. ETA in ten. Fire up the engines.”

  —

  Pearce drove and Mike stood in the pickup bed, manning the Russian PK machine gun. Early wore his shemagh around his face, Tuareg style, and a pair of Ray-Bans against the choking sand billowing up around him. His personal weapon was an FN SCAR-H CQC, the short-barreled version of the 7.62mm Special Forces Automatic Rifle. Early loved it because it was short, light, deadly accurate, easy to strip and clean, and fired the same big-caliber ammo handy as the ubiquitous AK-47, so common in Africa.

  Cella wedged into the passenger seat with her daughter on her lap, still groggy. The child was long but thin, with a mop of thick black hair. Cella folded her up in her arms as best as she could.

  “You can keep the ransom,” Pearce said. Thirty-thousand euros was a lot of money, but it wasn’t his.

  “It’s not ransom. It’s my trust fund money. My father sends it to me when there is a need among the people.”

  “How is your father these days?”

  She ignored the question. “Did you bring the medical supplies as well?”

  “It’s all there.”

  The girl moaned.

  “She okay?”

  Cella brushed the girl’s hair away from her face. Pearce glanced at her. She was a pretty young girl on the verge of a ferocious beauty. In a few years she’d be her mother’s twin.

  “She’s waking up a little, which is good. But I don’t want her to be completely awake, at least not until you’re in the air.”