White: A Novel

by Christopher Whitcomb

  “No, no . . . that’s quite sufficient.” The president sighed. He stood with his hands in his pockets. The vast amount of coffee he had consumed in the past two days made him tremble so badly, it embarrassed him.

  “What can we say about the investigation?” Beechum asked. The fact that they would all lose a night of crucial sleep for something like this seemed too much to deal with at this point.

  “As you know,” Alred answered, “we took down what we believed to be a safe house in Anacostia earlier this evening.”

  “Believed to be?” Havelock asked accusingly. Personality clashes had begun to show.

  “We’re still exploiting documents and hard drives that we recovered on-scene,” Alred continued, “but it looks like a bit of a dry hole at this point.”

  “What?” Venable barked. “You said they were terrorists. You said they were . . .”

  “We said they were suspects,” the FBI director snipped. At this hour, everyone felt more than a little raw. “Unfortunately, what we thought was a bomb-making operation turned out to be a credit card scam.”

  “Oh, for Chrisakes!” Havelock tossed his pen onto the table in what everyone judged just a bit too much theater.

  “This group appears to have had strong ties to radical mosques in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York,” Alred explained, “but it turns out that they were just trying to steal money. This was all about trying to rip off Muslims, not avenge them.”

  No one said a word.

  JEREMY AWOKE TO a ringing phone. The early morning skies remained dark through polyester shades. Sky-blue wallpaper, simulated wood grain, and pine picture frames lent the room a certain trailer-park feel. The exhausted traveler thought for a moment that he was floating in some mildly pleasant dream, but then the phone rang again, and he reached to answer.

  “Hello?” he asked on reflex. Jeremy had no earthly idea where he was.

  “Mr. Waller?” someone asked. Male voice. Official.

  “Yes.”

  “Good morning, sir, this is Mr. Taylor. The base commander asked me to give you a call and brief you on today’s schedule.”

  “Right,” Jeremy answered. He propped himself up on one elbow and reached for a pen and paper. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “We’ve got an all hands meeting in fifteen minutes at building twelve seventeen. We’ve got an EEI briefing set for zero-four-hundred, a walk-through at zero-six, psych workup at zero-nine, and chow at noon. Your people will be here at fourteen hundred for a UC ops scenario, then at seventeen hundred we’re back in the simulator until the evening meal at nineteen hundred. After that, we’ve scheduled in some study time.”

  Jeremy managed to jot down the times. He’d figure out the rest once his mind flicked back on.

  “Got it,” he lied. The clock read 2:29. He’d slept just an hour.

  “A driver will be waiting downstairs,” Mr. Taylor said. “He’ll take you over to the officers’ mess. Coffee’s strong, black, and hot. You sound like you could use some.”

  SIRAD WALKED DOWN a hallway flanked on both sides by break-out rooms, technology pods, and secure compartmented information facilities. Jordan Mitchell had hired most of the seventeenth floor’s top administrators away from military intelligence agencies, and they had designed the Rabbit Hole by combining the best aspects of NSA, CIA, and DIA operations.

  “Are we going to be able to work through this?” she asked. Hamid stayed a step behind her, fuming about her actions outside, but remaining professional.

  “Like you said, Sirad, there’s a time and a place for everything.”

  “Good,” she answered. “And this is neither.”

  The two executives turned left, into an odd-looking section of the hallway that had been lined with highly sensitive electronic sensors. Originally designed for CIA and NSA facilities, this Z-shaped “wave path” worked like an electromagnetic shower, scouring incoming workers for anything that might serve as a receiver, transmitter, or microphone. Rabbit Hole designers had shielded the seventeenth floor with lead and other acoustic buffers, but there was no point in taking chances. Tape recorders, PDAs, laptops, even the company’s own encrypted Quantis cell phones, were prohibited.

  “Why do I always feel like someone’s trying to peek up my skirt when I walk through here?” Sirad smiled. “Good thing I wore panties today, huh?”

  Hamid shook his head as they emerged at the other end of the twenty-foot hallway and stepped into a large operations center built of teak, green glass, and chrome. Television monitors lined three of the octagonal room’s walls. White boards, projection screens, time line organizers, and world clocks covered two others. The rest of the space opened through smoked-glass windows into executive conference rooms.

  Computer pods and cubicle work spaces covered much of the central floor space. Elaborate sound baffles hung from the ceiling, fifteen feet overhead. The floor itself was rubber.

  “Project managers in Suite A!” Sirad called out.

  Hamid, a numbers man at heart, counted twelve analysts in the Rabbit Hole’s main chamber. There should have been twice that many.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked. And then a door opened, and he knew the answer. Suite A, one of the glass-walled break-out rooms to his right, was already full. The experts Sirad would rely on for answers had apparently already gotten down to business.

  “What do we have?” Sirad asked, striding into the room. A nicely dressed “watchman” closed the door behind them. “I want to start at the beginning and work our way up step by step.”

  “That may be difficult,” Ravi said. He had already covered an expansive white board with more of his equations, marks, and drawings. “Things have changed a bit since our last meeting. The analysis indicates something a bit more troublesome than we first thought.”

  Sirad pulled out a chair beside an Asian man sporting a white lab coat with the name Lin embroidered over the left breast. He wore a crew cut that exposed numerous scars on his scalp, some partially obscured by his red Nike headband. A dozen other attendees had settled in behind stacks of paper and mechanical pencils. Sirad recognized none of them.

  “What we seem to have is a symbiotic feed ingest,” Ravi continued. He directed a laser pointer at one of his drawings and reached for a can of Fresca. “This appears to be more a surveillance effort than an actual intrusion. The people behind this seem to be casing our system, probing the armor, if you will, for chinks.”

  “Which means they haven’t actually broken in yet?” Sirad asked.

  “That’s right,” Ravi conceded. “It’s kind of like a train robber riding alongside the money car. They are tracking the data stream, monitoring aspects of our infrastructure without actually exposing themselves as thieves.”

  Sirad wondered about the Wild West analogy but found that it gave her a sense of the threat.

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” she asked. “If they haven’t actually made an attempt on the system, perhaps they haven’t compromised our codes. Do they know we’re onto them?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ravi said. “We built hypersensitive countersurveillance mechanisms into the Quantis conduit.”

  “Meaning we might have seen them before they see us?” Sirad asked.

  “Precisely.”

  “So if they haven’t broken in and they don’t know we’re watching them, what’s the bad news?”

  Ravi pointed to a thin young black man sitting directly across from Sirad. What most impressed her was not his poorly shaped Afro, his “I Can’t Dunk” T-shirt, or the pencil that flipped rhythmically between his long, thin fingers. What really stood out was the intensity of his stare. Sirad actually felt a chill.

  “This is a secret sharer probe.” The black man spoke firmly with a refined British accent. “In any coded exchange, both the sender and receiver must have a key. With the Quantis system, however, we’re talking about millions of subscribers, which requires a whole new way of looking at protocol.”

  “You can’t g
ive each user the key,” Sirad agreed. “You have to build it into the system.”

  “Correct. That limits key access to a very small universe of system gatekeepers.”

  “How small?” Hamid asked.

  “In an ideal world, one,” I Can’t Dunk said. “But this is not an ideal world. I’m sure that Jordan Mitchell wishes he alone could control access to Quantis, but that’s just not possible. If something happened to him, the system would eventually die, suffocated within its own hermetically sealed skin.”

  Sirad held up her hand like a grade-schooler. This man was right, of course: Jordan Mitchell had entrusted three others with portions of the key. She was one of them.

  “So you diversify,” she said. “You divide the secret into sections and share it among a small group of principals.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” the Afro-clad scientist affirmed. “But how do you keep them from collaborating against you?”

  He stood up, walked to Ravi’s white board, and began to draw.

  “Let’s call it the ‘Rabbit Hole paradox.’”

  The man drew a crude representation of the seventeenth floor facility’s front door.

  “Let’s say access to this room is based on a secret word instead of a cipher lock. And let’s say you want to prove to the security guard that you know that secret word without actually telling him what it is.”

  Sirad nodded. She had just faced a similar situation. If not for her stunning smile, she might not have gotten in without her badge.

  “What you need is a zero knowledge, interactive proof protocol that will show the security guard that you know the word without actually disclosing it. You send him into a control room where he can watch on CCTV but cannot hear. You simply call out the code word, the door opens, and in you go. He sees this and accepts the fact that you know the code.”

  “What if I simply guess the proper word?” Sirad asked. “Or what if someone opens it from the other side without the guard seeing?”

  “Precisely. There are any number of ways you could defeat a system like this. So you set up enough doors and enough repetitions that the tester can feel confident of a very small statistical likelihood for folderol.”

  Hamid and Sirad understood at the same moment.

  “This is someone from inside the company?” Hamid asked.

  “As one who deals in probability and statistical likelihood, I would have to assume that, yes,” Ravi said.

  Sirad thought hard about what to say next.

  “That puts us in a very tough position, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  “And you also have to consider the possibility that one aspect of the key has simply been stolen,” Ravi added.

  Sirad looked around the room. These faces were all new to her. She needed their expertise, but whom could she trust?

  “Rather sticky, isn’t it?” the I Can’t Dunk man said. “And now you see the first theorem of secrecy: in a closed system, the universe of principals is inversely square to the probability of compromise.”

  “The toughest thing about secrets,” Ravi explained, “is deciding who gets to keep them.”

  A POLITE IF firm E-5 met Jeremy downstairs and motioned him into a blue Navy van.

  “Welcome to the Point,” he said. A bright gold-capped tooth punctuated his broad smile. “First time down here?”

  “Yes.” Jeremy rubbed sleep out of his eyes. He hated the flat gray reality that followed overseas gigs, when your mind gives up its refusal to sleep and suddenly demands it.

  After a quick cup of coffee and a ride to building 1217, Jeremy thanked the sergeant and climbed out of the van in front of what looked like a western European row house. An air force major met him with a handshake.

  “Morning,” the perfectly creased officer greeted his guest. He offered no name. “Sleep well?”

  “Slept fine, sir,” Jeremy lied again. He tried to concentrate on pleasantries, but the surroundings distracted him to the point of mention.

  “You’ll have to forgive me, Major,” Jeremy said. The driver had dropped him off at the edge of what looked like a massive Hollywood studio lot. “But I didn’t get much of a briefing before coming down. Where the hell are we?”

  The major started laughing as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  “Welcome to MOUT facility, Harvey Point,” he said. “Military Operations Urban Terrain. Sixteen square blocks of any damned city in the world. This morning’s briefing will be in Munich. Head three blocks down Menkestrasse and you’ll find yourself in a little Basque village called Guillermo. London’s a couple blocks that way. We can design, engineer, and rough out virtually any interior you can imagine within twelve hours. Even less time in simulation—that’s primarily where you’ll do most of your preparation.”

  “You build fake cities?”

  “Just blocks, really, and it depends on what you call fake. Come on up and I’ll show you.”

  He led Jeremy inside the row house, up an elevator, and into an open room filled with closed-circuit television monitors, recording equipment, giant wall maps, computers, and blueprints. Digital clocks on the wall covered every time zone on earth, with Greenwich perched in the middle and labeled ZULU.

  A big sign on the wall read, THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS.

  “Welcome to postproduction,” the major said. “We’ve got monitoring capability that allows us to stage up to four scenarios simultaneously. That’s just on-property. We’ve got about ten thousand acres of woodland and rural training grounds, too, but that’s run from a separate facility.”

  “Scenarios for what?” Jeremy asked. He immediately regretted the question. The major gave him the same look Jesús had during the Yemen mission. Then he started laughing. “Oh, right . . . good one. You Agency guys are always so big on your opsec.”

  Agency guys? Jeremy thought.

  “You ready to get started?”

  Jeremy shrugged his shoulders. He remembered one of the questions on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory HRT had given him during selection. “Have you ever read Alice in Wonderland?” it asked. Suddenly it made perfect sense. Life on the wet side was a whole lot like chasing Alice.

  “Sure,” Jeremy replied. “Lead the way.”

  The major took him to a warehouse just outside “London.” Inside, he met four men, all white and all between the ages of thirty and fifty.

  John, who offered no last name, said he was a theologian at the Yale Divinity School. Paul introduced himself to be a clinical psychologist from Johns Hopkins. George claimed he was an army intelligence analyst assigned to Boling Air Force Base. Fred offered no background but promised to give Jeremy a thorough rundown on telltale signs of chemical and biological weapon production.

  “I’m not going to try and make you a molecular biologist,” he said. “Just want to teach you the subtle differences between phosphate-based fertilizer and WMD nerve agents. We might cook us up a little beer in the process, too.”

  Hollywood back lots? Postproduction facilities? Cooking beer? Jeremy wondered to himself. All Jesús had told him was that he was going on a little trip.

  “I’m Jeremy,” Waller said. “I work for the Justice Department.”

  “Good cover.” John chuckled. “First time I’ve heard that one.”

  BEECHUM STOOD AT the end of the table, obviously shocked. The president of the United States, if she had heard him correctly, had just proposed taking military action against a long-standing Middle Eastern ally.

  “You cannot launch a preemptive strike against the Saudis based on stereotypes and speculation!” she exclaimed.

  Whether it was the hour, the location, or the simple lack of reason on the president’s part, she felt compelled to intervene.

  “We have credible and actionable intelligence here, Elizabeth,” the president shot back. “I know you feel that your time on the Senate Intelligence Committee gives you some kind of cloak-and-dagger insight, but you’re not in the Senate anymore
. You work for me, and this president smells Saudi.”

  “We do have some positive developments,” Havelock said, trying to ease the tension. “The NSA has intercepted four separate open-line communications that you might find interesting.”

  Havelock held out his hand, and Vick passed him a half-inch-thick stack of overhear transcripts.

  “These are more than casual conversations,” he said, waving the documents in the air. “Specific times, dates, locations. Two regional government ministers talking with what we believe are operatives inside the United States. The calls were on Quantis phones, but we are trying to trace them.”

  “The NSA can’t track domestic calls,” Beechum objected. “That’s illegal.”

  “So is blowing up Wal-Mart!” Havelock bellowed. The stress had apparently begun to wear on him too.

  “What do you mean we can’t track domestic calls?” the president asked. “Why not?”

  “Something called the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the vice president told him. “The NSA surveys international calls indiscriminately, because noncitizens are not protected against unreasonable search and seizure. If we want a wire intercept in-CONUS, we either obtain a Title III warrant or FISA authorization.”

  Venable looked confused.

  “This is war, Mr. President,” Havelock said. Vick seemed to agree. Alred shook his head and sighed.

  “I’ve got to agree, David,” the secretary of defense joined in. “If the Saudis are financing terrorist operations against U.S. civilian targets, I don’t see how listening to their phone calls is going to violate anyone’s constitutional rights.”

  “Alred?” the president asked. He had come to rely heavily on the FBI director’s judgment.

  “That’s a question for DOJ lawyers,” he said. “Quite frankly, sir, I think the bigger issue is trying to stop the next round of attacks.”

  “Yes,” Venable agreed. “Good point. I don’t want to hear any more of these legal conundrums, understood? If there is an issue for general counsel, straighten it out before it crosses my desk . . . my podium . . . before I . . .”