by Nick Cook
Hetta moves to the podium and pulls up a headshot of an earnest-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties on the screen behind her. He has a full head of black, wavy hair and looks unkempt. One of his collars bends upward.
‘Meet Dr Joel Schweizer. A computer scientist who attended Harvard between 2001 and 2003. This is a contemporary photograph, the best that we have. Two years after leaving, he founded a company called Sub-Quantum Dynetics, which dedicated itself to building the world’s first commercially available quantum computer. Quantum computers aren’t like classical computers. They are designed to solve unsolvable problems.
‘Seven years ago, Dr Schweizer showed up on an unclassified contract run out of the Army Research Laboratory for a Holographic Information Transfer System, funded by Congress to test a hypothesis that information – hard, physical data – exists in a diffuse electromagnetic field at the quantum level of space: what you might call the fundamental level of existence. There is no hard evidence that data exists in this field, but the theory was first aired publicly by a man who worked out of the same department as Schweizer, a physicist named Dr Elliott Kaufmann. Kaufmann called this infinite repository of data the holosphere, and said he was working on the architecture of a coupling device – tech that Colonel Cain believes he meant to tap into it.
‘For this heresy, Kaufmann got howled down by his peers. He then turned up at the Baltimore Central Institute of Technology the following year. Baltimore CIT led the work on the transfer system.’
‘And Gapes?’ Thompson asks. ‘Where does he fit in?’
‘The Army’s science lab was sponsored by INSCOM, Gapes’s taskmasters. To calibrate, to tune the system, one Stani Koori trained Gapes and others in the protocols of remote viewing. Then Gapes replaced Koori. There are photos of him wearing a helmet with electrodes that attach directly to the scalp. INSCOM put money into the transfer system because Congress said it had to match its investment in the resurrected remote viewing program.
‘Judging by the Army Research Lab documentation, I don’t think INSCOM was fully committed until Dr Joel Schweizer was contracted for the third-generation helmet.’
The timing is interesting, she adds, because from the moment he left Harvard to the moment he showed up on the paperwork, Dr Schweizer had gone rather quiet.
‘From 2007, S-Q Dynetics was subcontracted to work at a place called the Multi-program Research Facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The sponsors behind the facility are an alphabet soup of agencies with a vested interest in high-speed computing. Their aim, in fact, was to build the world’s fastest computer. And, like so much sensitive government work, it involved both open-source and classified elements. The open-source part is how we know about the involvement of S-Q Dynetics. It also allowed for those rumors of quantum computer sales to intelligence agencies both particular and unspecified to filter out into the world.
‘The classified piece, of course, was run by the NSA, whose target was the proliferating encryption arena that was allowing terrorists, criminals and bad guy states to talk to each other without fear of interception.
‘In 2009, just after Oak Ridge announced it had developed the world’s fastest computer, it brought down the shutters and restricted briefings on the program to no more than a handful in the intelligence community and Congress. But there were whispers that the NSA was on its way to the world’s first exaflop machine – a supercomputer with enough speed to crunch the sum of human knowledge in less than a second. The only way to do that was by covertly adding a quantum-computing element.’
‘So, when Schweizer joined Kaufmann in Baltimore,’ Reuben says, ‘your theory is that he brought the power of quantum computing to bear on Kaufmann’s holosphere?’
‘I think we can safely assume it’s more than theory, Mr Kantner,’ Hetta says. ‘Schweizer knew Kaufmann. They worked out of the same building at Harvard, and I’ve followed enough audit trails to know when something ain’t right. Everything at the Army lab was heading in one direction: the corroboration of the theory, Gapes’s replacement of Koori, modest funding increases, money for a Gen 3 helmet, the display of data from the holosphere on some kind of visuals system … when the funding was slashed, and a note appeared on the contract to say there had been a problem all along.
‘Their mistake was shutting down Schweizer’s computing company and Baltimore CIT. To avoid suspicion, it would have been better to keep them going, but my guess is they panicked when he ran.’
Reuben leans forward. ‘Who ran?’
‘Gapes. Going AWOL was a cover story. They needed to make him invisible. But something spooked him and he hightailed it for real.’
‘Until he announced his presence last week,’ Reuben says. ‘The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Hart: who are they?’
Hetta switches to a photo, taken at dusk, of buildings nestling at the base of a snow-capped mountain. Bright lights flare in the lens. I’ve seen it before.
‘This is the Utah Data Center. Bluffdale, built on an old runway on a closed-off piece of government land beneath the Wasatch Mountains, south of Salt Lake City. It comprises four data halls, each half the size of the Pentagon, filled with servers. It’s one of a number of NSA storage sites for the thirty trillion phone calls, emails, personal data trails and Google searches it’s estimated to have collected from its surveillance activities since 9/11.
‘A contact of mine at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency told me last night that six years ago construction began on an extension to the site in an arroyo out in the Wasatch. Unlike the other buildings in the UDC, this place is totally isolated and almost entirely underground.
‘Geospatial believe it to be completely self-sustaining. It has its own water supply and gets fed two hundred megawatts of electricity, enough for a small town. Fuel tanks give it a week’s worth of back-up generation. An image of this building is one of three removed without our sanction from the cabin, we now believe by a freelance contractor that’s intimately connected to the NSA: Triple Z Services.’
Cabot leans in. ‘Triple Z, we believe, Mr President, has been outsourced to handle the clean-up.’
‘And you were followed from Bethesda,’ Thompson says.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘By these people?’
‘No, sir. By the Army. Their Criminal Investigation Division.’ Hetta pauses. ‘Not in the same league.’
‘Agent Hart managed to apprehend a member of their surveillance team,’ Graham announces. ‘He’s still being interrogated by the FBI agent who’s heading up the task force charged with the church shooting investigation. Special Agent Wharton is passing data to us when he gets it, but it appears they were assigned to follow Hart and Colonel Cain by General Johansson.’
‘Johansson? Of JaySOC?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Wharton?’
‘Wharton is a good guy, Mr President,’ Hetta says. ‘He and SAIC Lefortz shared a lot of history. In fact, Agent Wharton told Colonel Cain that Lefortz discussed some kind of investigation – a “probe” – commissioned by you. That he was working on it before he was killed. Does that make any sense to you, sir?’
Thompson looks up. ‘A probe?’
‘Yes, Mr President.’
‘I don’t know of any probe, Agent Hart.’
Hetta looks at him. ‘You sure, Mr President?’
Reuben brings his hand down. ‘Agent Hart, I’ll remind you that you’re talking to the President.’
‘I know, Mr Kantner. I was merely—’
I touch her arm. ‘Why don’t we get back to Triple Z and the images that were lifted from the cabin?’
‘OK … sure.’ Hetta takes a moment to regroup. ‘There are so many images on the walls, we believe they made a calculation we wouldn’t notice that three of them had been swapped. But I’d photographed the cabin the night Colonel Cain and I first came across it and we were able to get the results to Christy Byford for further analysis.
‘This is the plac
e they’ve been trying to protect all along.’
With one of her looks, she lets me know she’s done.
I pick up the thread. ‘Here’s what we think happened, Mr President. When the HITS helmet technology actually worked, INSCOM knew they were way out of their depth. So they gifted it to the NSA. And the next version of HITS, a black joint venture between INSCOM and the NSA, is just short of being fully operational.’
I point to the photo of the bunker.
‘Three years ago, while Gapes was still convalescing from his burns, he told his mother they were sending him to the desert. We thought he was talking about Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. He wasn’t. He was talking about Utah. They needed him to calibrate the system.
‘We also have an explanation for the dream-flashbacks. They were listed in the Army lab data as a side effect.’
‘Jesus,’ Thompson says.
‘Gapes told his mom he was scared. Very scared. Nobody paid her any attention because she had dementia and, belt and braces, the Army bought the family’s silence with a compensation package for what it had done to a traumatized ex-vet.
‘This thing is so big, this … whatever this amalgam of the NSA and INSCOM calls itself, is so secret, it needed anyone they couldn’t completely trust to vanish.’ I reel them off. Kaufmann, Schweizer, Gapes …
The President brings down his hand. ‘You’re telling me they can see everything we’re doing?’
Up till now Christy hasn’t said anything. She touches his arm. ‘That’s precisely what Josh is saying, sir.’
‘Right now?’
‘No sir, not now. Soon.’
Six pairs of eyes turn to me.
‘Since this started, Agent Hart and I have asked ourselves one question, over and over. If Gapes knew of a plot to kill you, Mr President, why didn’t he give us chapter and verse?’
Thompson leans forward. ‘You’re not alone, Colonel.’
‘Well, sir, Gapes knew if he went the WikiLeaks route, unveiling a technology that gives the intelligence community the means to hack into our movements, the world would have dismissed him, and it, as just crazy. So he decided to drip-feed us the data, having seized our attention in a way we couldn’t possibly ignore.’
‘Why?’
‘Because black operators make errors when they’re forced into the light. Look at Clarke’s Crossroads. A master in the art of the hit took a step back and left us a bloody footprint. And this tech hasn’t yet been perfected. Gapes knew there’s a gap between the acquisition of data and it becoming intelligible to the end-user.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’ Cabot asks.
‘Ten days ago, twenty-four hours before he mounted his protest at the church, Gapes shared his plans with a homeless vet, a guy called Steve at the Settlement, knowing that, in doing so, he was “unmasking” – blooming, in effect – on the system that’s installed at Bluffdale.’
‘What do you mean?’ Cabot says.
‘Gapes might have found a method of shielding his movements, but Steve hadn’t. To fulfill his plan, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, Gapes needed to announce himself. Since this system evidently couldn’t track him, his method was to shock it into awareness. He announced his plans to a wheelchair-bound vet and told him to remember them. He then pressed the guy’s hands to his burned face so that the data imprinted. Since I’ve no doubt the system has some kind of early warning mode, this is the moment Gapes would have popped up on its radar screen. He was deliberately alerting it to his presence.’
‘I have a confession to make,’ Cabot says. ‘Which I now see plays into what you’re suggesting.’ He clears his throat, a little self-consciously. ‘The day you discovered the cabin, we received an anonymous tip-off that you and Hart had been operating off the books. That’s why we hauled you in and polygraphed you.
‘I think it was part of a damage limitation strategy these people triggered when they realized that we had moved a step ahead of them. I’m sorry, Colonel …’
Contrition from Cabot. You could hear a pin drop.
‘You were saying, Josh,’ the President says. ‘About the technology having not yet been perfected …’
I nod. ‘Hart and I found the cabin outside Blacksoil two days after Gapes popped up at the church. We followed a set of leads I believe were intended by him to keep us one step ahead of the system’s ability to track us – his food, pieces of deer meat that he left in the basement of the church, part of a note we found there, and the collapsible canoe we think he used to covertly enter D.C. The crazy wall, as we called it, was filled with further clues.
‘By the time the system realized we were there, Lefortz was already sending reinforcements. So they did the only thing they could: sent in a CID team. And not just Army, but Triple Z, black ops contractors who knew exactly what they were looking for and removed it. We all presumed there’d been a leak. There hadn’t. Bluffdale had kicked in.
‘The system wasn’t operating cold by that point. It must have switched into some kind of tracking mode, because the lag between detection and intervention was twelve hours.’
The President frowns. Christy starts to scribble.
‘The essential point is we now know its operational parameters: twelve hours if it’s running hot; twenty-four if it has to acquire a target from a standing start. To put it another way, Mr President, the NSA and INSCOM will know about the discussion we are having in this room within that frame. That’s how long we have.’
‘Mr President,’ Hetta adds, ‘gaining access to this site is going to be challenging. The video surveillance is visible from the geospatial imagery. There will be intruder alarms. Most of Western Utah is filled with military installations, some of which will provide this place with top-cover – active defense measures – in the event of a terrorist attack. There’s a twelve-foot-high fence around the facility that can stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling at sixty miles per hour, which would rule out pretty much any kind of direct assault, except by helicopter.’
‘And who do you suggest does this?’ Cabot asks.
‘It wouldn’t be for me to say, Mr Cabot. That would be down to President Thompson. But if an assault were to be launched, sir, I believe it should be by us, the Secret Service.’
Cabot starts to laugh. ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’
‘No, sir,’ Hetta says. ‘Four people are dead – five, if you include Gapes’s recovery support specialist – and we have no reason to believe the killings won’t continue. Gapes has said there is a threat to the President and everything he has either told us or fed us so far has turned out to be on the money. The Ilitch link – which extends to a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown, Edward van Buren, who is known to Colonel Cain – prompts us to believe that Gapes may be warning us of even deeper connections which are, well, kind of freaky.’
‘An NSA or INSCOM link to the Russians?’
‘Yes,’ Hetta says.
‘Why?’
‘We really don’t know.’
‘I could run it past my liaison at the embassy.’ Christy looks at me. ‘With your buddy, Joshua. Colonel Dmitri Sergeyev. As well as being a spook, he’s our link with their Special Forces on the WMD search-and-destroy front.’
She turns to the President.
‘Go ahead,’ Thompson tells her. ‘But, Christy, I don’t want any of this to rock my Moscow bilateral, you hear?’
‘It won’t,’ she says.
‘Let’s you and me talk about this offline,’ Reuben says to her. ‘Finesse the narrative.’
‘Do we have precedent?’ Graham asks.
After his interrogation, Reuben looks as if he might reach out and strangle him. ‘Precedent? What the hell are you talking about?’
Graham flushes. ‘For one agency taking down another?’
‘We have no time for legalities,’ I say. ‘If we do, it will increase our chances of detection. And whatever action we take needs to be extremely tight. It’s essential we move to detain General J
ohansson at Fort Bragg and the INSCOM RV team at Fort Meade at the same time as we make our move on Bluffdale.’
‘You guys just focus on the NSA and Bluffdale,’ Christy says. ‘I’ll take care of the military.’
‘What assets do we have in Utah?’ Cabot asks Hetta.
‘A field office in Salt Lake City, but it’s mainly administrative. We’re going to have to bring our own units with us. I’d like to suggest we take two teams out of the Presidential Protection training cycle. Our only air assets in Utah are in the east: a couple of Hueys. Snake Ranch Mesa. Between Huntington and Green River.’
‘Can it take a jet?’ Cabot asks.
It has a seven-thousand-foot runway, Hetta says.
34
I FIND REUBEN SITTING ON A BENCH AMONG THE TREES IN FRONT of the West Colonnade. He’s leaning forward, staring at the ground, smoking a cigarette, something I haven’t seen him do in years.
He looks up and attempts a smile. I pull my jacket closer. It’s almost freezing, and Reuben is just in a suit. His hand trembles slightly.
For a second or two, neither of us says anything. My head is filled with the rudiments of an assault plan. In ten minutes, Hetta and I will leave for Reagan, where the Vomit Comet is being readied for a departure under a false-file flight plan to Salt Lake City. A second jet is being prepared for rapid egress out of Baltimore for the ten members of the Presidential Protection Division’s Counter-Assault Team, known as ‘the CAT’, who are being briefed by Graham at their training ground in Beltsville, MD.
Nothing we do may be communicated in any form, as we have to assume that the people listening to us will be tuned into our phones, our emails, our Internet searches, everything.
And if I’m right about the Kaufmann/Schweizer surveillance system, it will have picked up on the fact that Hetta and I have been to the contracts office of the Army Research Lab and followed the HITS thread as far as our conclusions about the holosphere.