The REM Precept

by J. M. Lanham

  “That may have once been the case, Graham. But it was you who divulged the sacred knowledge of your family to an American businessman who has since taken it and attempted to spread it to the masses. And with Ocula still in the medicine cabinets of millions of Americans, including those who have bought into Ford’s practices, we simply cannot ignore this potential threat any longer.”

  “There is no threat, Ramírez!”

  “What may not be considered harmful to you could be catastrophic to everyone else. To the world, even.” Ramírez took a step back to two-tap the door, signaling the guards outside to enter. They flanked Dawa and helped him stand up as he held his chin high.

  “Dangerous to the world? Tummo? That is the most ridiculous thing you have insinuated yet, Ramírez. You have become so obsessed with this project that you have lost sight of what is right and what is wrong. Ocula is the real danger here; the danger we should all be fighting against.”

  Ramírez said, “Ocula alone didn’t cause Poás Volcano to erupt, now did it?”

  Dawa tried to hide a look of heartrending concern. “You cannot be serious. To believe a meditative practice had something to do with a natural disaster?”

  “I’m not sure what I believe yet, Mr. Graham. But you can trust that I’m going to get to the bottom of this, starting with your extended family in Tibet. You may not care about what happens to you, but we’ve already got agents in Nepal on the case, so if you truly care about those people then we’ll have your full cooperation.” He motioned for the guards to escort an incensed Graham out.

  “Where are they taking me?”

  “Down the hall, to one of our special cells designed specifically for the outliers. Can’t leave you to your own devices any longer.”

  The guards led Graham out of the room, turning down the narrow hallway that glowed a fluorescent blue and led to the outlier holding cells. Narrow is the path, thought Graham, never missing the irony in a precarious situation. On the surface, it seemed so simple, the notion of making the right choices in life. Doing the right thing should be easy, right?

  But the path ahead of him, the long and narrow path toward captivity at the end of the hall, served no right or just or moral purpose. They walked past the first set of cells as Dawa squinted to read the names, hastily printed and taped to the doors. Everly, Diana. Griffin, Julie. Rogers, Tonya. Strassman, Richard. The Four Horsemen (or Women) from Guantanamo. And near the end, a cell without a note on the door. Didn’t need one. The detective already knew it was his.

  That was what lay ahead if he continued traveling down the fluorescently lit narrow path buried two thousand feet beneath a mountain in Shenandoah National Park.

  But the path that strayed? The path that led elsewhere, not bound by the rigid confines and strict rules of this world? A path hidden from two eyes, but clear as day to a third?

  Well, that was where things got a little tricky.

  Chapter 22:

  Best-Laid Plans

  That Friday afternoon, Stephen Cline made the trip to the Skyline facility, about an hour from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On most days, he could make it to the rural intersection where the Jeep trail leading to the mountain compound met the asphalt in under forty-five minutes. But somehow, between Metro-area traffic leaving DC; a stop for some much-needed coffee; and a tense argument with a couple of thick-skulled park rangers over who did and didn’t have the right to be in Shenandoah National Park during a controlled burn, Cline had turned an afternoon drive into a three-hour tour.

  By the time he met Ramírez in the facility’s central lab he was disheveled, coon-eyed, and running on pure adrenaline. Ramírez pointed out his mop top and said, “Santa mierda, jefe,” saving his colleague from the more abrasive English version of “Holy shit, boss.” He continued, “What in the hell happened to you, my friend?”

  Cline tried to tame his hair as he spoke. “Been a helluva week out there, Ramírez. Helluva week. But no time to talk about it now. You got the file I asked for?”

  “Of course,” he said, handing it over. “Also, I just got off the phone with the director. I was pleased to hear she finally came around.” He took Cline by the shoulder and walked toward the central control station. “So how’d you get her on board with our latest endeavor, anyway?”

  “Simple. I lied.”

  Ramírez cocked his head inquisitively as Cline explained. “Lancaster has been trying to shut down the facility from the moment she took office. And you know as well as I do she’d never go along with the idea of deploying a mobile broadcasting unit to take our little dream project on the road. So I told her a supraliminal transmission from Skyline was our best bet at bringing this whole outlier case to a close.”

  “And she bought it?”

  “Ramírez, my boy. You worry too much. Lancaster’s been in office for six months. She hasn’t come close to understanding how far-reaching Project THEIA goes.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ramírez said as he rubbed his chin. “And the mobile unit is in a safe location, no?”

  Cline looked around, then whispered, “Atlanta. In a secure warehouse just outside of the perimeter. As far as the director’s concerned, the technology doesn’t even exist yet.”

  Ramírez breathed a sigh of relief. “Good, good. You know, jefe, it was always our dream to take everything we learned in Costa Rica and mobilize it. If things hadn’t gone south so quickly at the original facility, I truly believe we’d already have countless units at our disposal, limited only by the number of outliers we could retain for each one.”

  “Yes, well therein lies another problem with upper management. No way Lancaster would ever sign off on sending outliers into the field like that. Too much of a liability. And I’m not gonna lie: the idea of deploying one of our four remaining assets into the field makes me a little nervous.”

  “No lock on the remaining outliers, I take it.”

  “Well, we know Paul Freeman and Fenton Reed are in FBI custody, and Connor’s off-the-grid again.”

  “Again?”

  “Slippery, that one. But I’m sure she’ll turn up.”

  Ramírez nodded. “Any idea how much the feds know?”

  “Not yet. They showed up thinking they had a lead on Donny Ford. They don’t have a clue who Freeman and Reed are, except that they’re possible accomplices to a federal fugitive.”

  “Well Reed’s just a kid, so hopefully they won’t take him too seriously. But Freeman troubles me. Do you think they’ll make the connection to our project here once he starts talking?”

  Cline chuckled. “Highly unlikely. Ford is wanted on a double homicide. It’s a pretty cut-and-dried case. Any diversion from the facts will only make Freeman look like he’s hiding something. Protecting Ford. And that’s good for us. With any luck, the guy will start in on CIA conspiracies and magical sleeping pills.”

  “They’ll think he’s loco.”

  “Precisely. And that’s the best part of our business here, Ramírez. We’re working with technology that’s so hard to believe, not even the feds would take it seriously—”

  “—giving us the green light to do whatever we want, right, jefe?”

  A sly smile arose on Cline’s face as he closed the file and walked to the observation window. “One last hoorah,” he said, looking into the empty room. “Have you thought about who you want to send into the field?”

  “I have. I specifically used Griffin and Everly to run tests on the mobile software, leaving Rogers and Strassman with fresh minds and without an R.E.M. event in almost a week. Normally I would suggest using Rogers, since she has historically been the most reliable of the bunch.”

  “Let me guess: you’re thinking Strassman.”

  “His record isn’t as clean as the other three, I know. But sending an outlier into the field for the first time is a huge risk. It would be a shame to lose one of our best performers if anything goes wrong and you have to pull the plug.”

  “Ah come on, Ramírez. Have a little faith in t
he program here.”

  “I’m a scientist, jefe. Faith isn’t part of the job description. The mobile unit was designed to harness the power of a facility as large as Skyline, and it’s never been tested in the field. There’s a lot that could go wrong, which is why we need to play it safe and keep our best outliers here at Skyline. That’s all.”

  Cline ultimately agreed. Using Rogers to run the beta software for the supraliminal program at Skyline would effectively dupe the entire on-site staff as well as Lancaster, while keeping their greatest asset protected from any mishaps that might arise during the mobile operation in Atlanta.

  It wasn’t lost either on the old station chief that keeping up appearances mattered. One slip of Cline’s grand plan and Lancaster would know about it—and subsequently pull him off the assignment within the hour. And the last thing Cline wanted was to be pulled off this assignment. The stakes were too high.

  “I trust your judgment, Ramírez,” Cline said as he stepped away from the window. “Strassman it is. We’ll need to prepare him for transport within the hour.” He handed over a set of fake transfer papers detailing the traveling outlier’s nonexistent trip back to Gitmo. “Think you can handle it?”

  Ramírez was already on the phone, ringing security to have Strassman escorted from his holding cell. “I’m on it, jefe.”

  ***

  Another motel. Another move. By Paul’s estimation, it was the twenty-fifth in just as many weeks. Or was it the twenty-sixth? At this point, he couldn’t keep track. No wonder everyone in the room was on edge. It was bad enough to be on the run again, but to have lost Fenton’s laptop, the files, and every ounce of leverage in one fell swoop of a ten-thousand-ton freight train? Now that was enough to drive anyone mad. All Paul knew as he lay on the bed of yet another two-star establishment was that everything was now riding on Fenton’s backup files; the ones he supposedly kept on the cloud. But if those were compromised …

  “You awake over there, Paul?” Claire asked as she looked out of the peephole to spot Sarah cradling an armful of junk food on the other side. She let her in as Paul answered, rubbing his eyes,

  “Yeah, I’m awake. Just a little out of it. That’s all.”

  “Here.” Sarah tossed Paul a soda. “That should help.”

  Paul took a sip and nodded thanks before asking Claire, “You sure we’re officially off-the-grid here? That you didn’t get followed from Sarah’s house?”

  “Not a chance. If the CIA knew we were here, they’d be here by now. Trust me. They don’t have a clue.”

  Claire’s confidence in their getaway made Paul feel a little better, but not by much. He walked over to the window and peered out between the blinds, hoping to catch a glimpse of Fenton on his way back from using the guest computer in the motel lobby.

  “Think he’ll be back soon?”

  “Who knows. But I don’t like this. Don’t like it at all.” She checked her watch. “He’s been gone way too long, and every minute that goes by just adds to the chance that we are most certifiably fucked.”

  “Losing the laptop in a train wreck is one thing. But not having backups? Didn’t he say at the cabin that he had everything backed up on the cloud?”

  “That was the story,” Claire said, “and he’d have no reason to lie about it, which makes me think something bad’s happened.”

  “Like what?”

  Claire shrugged. “Dunno. Files could’ve been compromised. Lost. Searched out and deleted. Kid’s had a bullseye on his back for over a year now. No way the CIA hasn’t been watching his every move online.”

  “But he’s the hacker. He’s supposed to be good at covering his tracks, right?”

  “What are we doing here, Paul?”

  It was clear he didn’t understand Claire’s pivot, so she elaborated. “We’ve been on the run for six months. And the only reason we’re alive today is because we never stopped running. That’s it. Same goes for anything that takes place online. The moment you stop running, they nail you.”

  A hasty five-beat rap on the door interrupted Paul’s next question as Claire peered out. The door opened and the kid barged in and slammed the door behind him, startling Claire as he took to pacing the narrow stretch of carpet in front of the beds leading to the bathroom while mumbling something along the lines of “This is not good. This is not good. This is not fucking good …”

  “Fenton, buddy,” Paul said. “Let’s calm down a little, okay? Just tell us what’s going on, what the problem is.”

  “They’re gone. They’re gone. They’re all FUCKING gone.”

  “What’s gone, Fenton?”

  “The files. All of them. All of my backups. A dozen encrypted zip files socked away on a dozen private servers just vanished right into thin air.” He nervously pulled his hair and stared into the floor. “It just doesn’t make any sense!”

  “You said they were private servers,” Claire said. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “Servers that are dedicated to single organizations. One company, one server sorta thing. A lot of Fortune 500 companies are using private servers in the cloud now instead of storing data on-site. I mean it’s not like I uploaded the files to a social media account or a generic file hosting service; I spread them across twelve random servers in the cloud. And now they’re gone. All. Fucking. Gone.”

  Perplexed, Paul asked, “You think the CIA had a hand in this? That they can monitor servers like that across the country and remove incriminating files at will?”

  “Of course they can,” Fenton said. “They had super computers doing their digital dirty work long before the average American even knew what the Patriot Act was.”

  Claire asked, “What about other countries? It’s one thing to spy on your own house, but how could they even begin to effectively monitor servers in other countries?”

  “They can’t,” Fenton said. “I mean, the U.S. has surveillance programs that partner with allied countries like the UK and France, but for the most part, the CIA can’t possibly monitor every computer in the world.”

  “So why not back your files up to a foreign server?” Claire asked.

  “Say that again?”

  “A foreign server, Fenton. If you already knew the CIA had the capability of not only monitoring the very servers you were storing these files on, but could also wipe them clean, then why in the hell didn’t you back them up to a country where the federal government wasn’t actively working to get us all killed?”

  “Says the lady who left all of the hard copies on the kitchen table.”

  “We had to get out of there fast. No time to think.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Look,” Claire said. “We should have grabbed the files, sure. But things were a little hectic.”

  “A little hectic? If I’d known you’d be so careless with the files I busted my ass to get I would’ve taken them with me in the first place.”

  “And where would you have put them, genius? Your laptop bag? Why in the hell did you take that thing to Sturgis’ in the first place?”

  Paul had had enough. He got between them and said, “Look, all of this bitching is getting us nowhere. Yes, Claire should’ve grabbed the files. She didn’t. No, Fenton shouldn’t have taken the laptop to Sturgis’ house, but he did. These things happened, and now we have to deal with it.” He turned to Fenton. “You’re sure there are no online backups of the files?”

  “Positive.”

  Sarah rose up from the chair in the corner and asked, “What about hacking into the CIA. You know, like you did the first time?”

  Fenton was shaking his head before she could finish. “Highly unlikely. I got in the first time by exploiting a backdoor, and there’s no way they haven’t discovered it by now. If I had to guess, everything was patched up and sealed tight the day they realized their systems were breached.”

  Sarah said, “So that’s it? We’re just back to square one?”

  “Square one would be a start,” Claire said. “But if we�
��ve got less of a chance of getting those files back than we did a week ago, we might as well call a news crew, march down to Asteria headquarters, and let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Chips,” Fenton repeated the word as he raised his head, hope springing from his wide eyes. “The files. Asteria headquarters. Outdated chips …” The comment drew nothing but blank stares, so he explained. “The same flaw in the CIA’s vast array of mainframe servers was the flaw that helped me download all the juicy files we had in the first place.”

  “And that is?” Claire asked.

  “Outdated chips. The agency was operating on mainframe processors that were devoting more time to the tasks they wanted to and less time for security, leaving little computational power left over to protect data through encryption.”

  “That’s all been fixed by now,” Paul said. “Isn’t that what you just told us?”

  “Sure. No doubt the CIA’s got teams of security experts checking and rechecking their latest updates to make sure people like me can’t get in the same way again. But that’s just it: I’m not talking about hacking into the CIA again. I’m talking about Asteria.”

  Claire wanted to smack herself for not thinking of the same thing (Paul and Sarah, too). Every file they’d obtained about the Ocula conspiracy was a two-way street. CIA wanted this, Asteria made that. Tanner wrote the checks, Sturgis cashed them. It wasn’t so cut-and-dried, of course, but the fact remained that whatever could be obtained from CIA servers regarding the Ocula conspiracy, in theory, could be obtained from the very pharmaceutical company responsible for the drug and subsequent cover-up.

  Paul asked, “You think Asteria’s computers have the same flaw as the one you exploited when you got into the CIA database?”

  “Sort of, but not in the way you’re thinking, because I can’t hack my way out of this one.”