Lockout

by John J. Nance

  “Prepped in what way?”

  “Quietly reprogrammed from the ground to carry this mystery signal on their normal datastreams from an existing transponder whenever it receives a carefully coded order. But Seth, what I haven’t discovered is, where is the mother burst coming from? I was working to pinpoint it when the signals stopped. I’ll have to go into the historic data now.”

  “Geographically, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Where’s the uplink coming from? That might give us a clue as to who’s behind it. “

  “Wait, Jenny, you said the signals stopped?”

  “Yes!” she scooted her chair toward him in excitement, an index finger in the air. “There was what appeared to be an answering burst, then an acknowledgement, then nothing. We ran a series of signal comparisons and found that the programming message changed after the answering burst.”

  “Something responded?”

  “Yes, just about three hours ago. Some station somewhere accepted the programming order, or at least that’s what we assume happened. So, just like I said before, the question eating at me is: What entity or machine has been told to do or not to do something? See, if this wasn’t nefarious, why the hell would someone go to this extreme to keep the process coded and secret?”

  “Was there any sudden breakthrough idea you came up with or some suggestion made that might have triggered our DIA man’s departure?”

  “No. Just the message he received. I didn’t get to read it. And suddenly he’s evacuating. At least it felt like an evacuation.”

  Seth Zieglar shook his head. “Well … my guess is something much more dramatic just came up. And I’ll bet … if we did a little digging on the current classified alert channels …”

  She was already brightening. “Yeah! Got it. I’ll dive in.”

  “Tomorrow, Jen. Tomorrow you dive in. You should go home now. You do have one of those, right?”

  “One of what?” she said, puzzled.

  “A home. I seem to recall a long suffering cat in your life.”

  “Oh, that would be Duke. But he’s okay alone. He only dies of malnutrition if I’m gone more than a week.”

  “Lucky cat.”

  “Lemme work late on this, Seth.”

  “You can if you want, but … is this going to help us?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t tell. Want to keep digging.”

  “It gets spooky around here late at night.”

  “I know, but I’m not alone.”

  Seth pulled himself to his feet and waved. “Okay. Have a great evening! I’ll be home if you uncover the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

  “What? I don’t think I understand.”

  “Just … a joke. Don’t stay so late tonight that you don’t make it in tomorrow on time, okay?”

  “Got it,” she said.

  Ten minutes later, a fresh coffee in hand, Jenny settled back into her work station and keyed up one of the secure intelligence channels just as the phone rang with Seth on the other end, his voice, she thought, a touch too cheerful.

  “Okay, Jenny, mystery solved. Our Mr. Bronson just called my cell phone and essentially said it turns out to be a classified DOD thing, and don’t worry, he’ll explain later, and thanks so much for the help. He said he was greatly impressed by you.”

  “You’re on your cell phone, right?” she asked, well aware that somewhere in their own NSA building their words were flowing into an immense datastream recording bank and being examined for trigger words or phrases. The public might have been exempted now from phone monitoring but definitely not NSA personnel.

  “That would be a correct assumption. In any event, unless you just want to stay and play video games, go home. Nothing to see here.”

  “You’re sure?” she probed, evaluating the nuances of his reply and the time he took to speak it.

  “We … have no reason … of which I am currently aware … to not take our compatriots at their word. So … unless it’s making up for what you didn’t get done today on normal tasks, go home.”

  “Uh, huh. Okay. G’night Seth.”

  “Likewise.”

  She disconnected the line and stared at the phone’s screen for the better part of a minute. What the hell was that? She’d worked for Seth long enough to know his vocal patterns, and that was a very stressed version of her boss. Stressed and unnatural.

  Jenny shivered involuntarily, wondering what kind of interdepartmental intrigue would cause a chain reaction like she was apparently witnessing: DIA doing strange things and perhaps causing Seth to make calls to her with information she inherently couldn’t trust.

  I’d make a terrible spy, she concluded. I’d see duplicity everywhere. Hell, I DO see duplicity everywhere.

  The memory of a close encounter with a psychologist two years before swam unbidden into her consciousness. She’d thought she’d found a clandestine ring of spies within the confines of her own department, and the suspicion had grown to unbearable proportions before Seth and his boss had in essence done an intervention to calm her down. Paranoid tendencies, the doctor had cautioned her, could be fanned by such thinking. Seth should not have used that word with her, ever … although she wasn’t sure the diagnosis had ever been shared with him. It embarrassed her terribly, especially when the Snowden case erupted and for a few hours she thought he was a validation of her suspicions—until it turned out he was from an entirely different department and a contractor to boot.

  Jenny looked back at the computer screen and re-focused. The secure channel was still blinking and the flag indicating a breaking bulletin had popped up, an initial alert regarding a commercial flight that had suddenly reversed course off the west coast of Ireland and might be a hijacking. She glanced at it passively as she mentally replayed Seth’s call.

  A sudden wave off from the Defense Intelligence Agency had been phoned not through channels, but to Seth’s cell phone. And Bronson not calling her meant what? An insult? A determination to prevent her from knowing anything more? Had she suggested something that worried them? And if the programmer and the programmed were both DOD entities, why the hell hadn’t the Defense Intelligence team known that themselves when they walked in? Surely Bronson didn’t need a team of people wasting an afternoon just to ferret out the little that she knew. He could have had that information for the asking.

  Or, she smiled to herself, for dinner and a little intimate persuasion. Two glasses of wine and a few kisses, and I’d sing like a canary!

  She forced herself back to the serious mode.

  No, it felt like a turf thing, and she was used to tug of wars between intelligence agencies that were supposed to be fighting for the same team. Such had been going on from time immemorial.

  I shouldn’t have teased Seth, she thought, recalling his attempted joke about Pearl Harbor. She knew that story very well, and how all the American intelligence agencies at the time had been withholding information and fighting each other so ridiculously that firmly predicting an impending attack on Hawaii had been all but impossible.

  So, is this the DIA pushing us away? she wondered. Probably not.

  But, there was something about Bronson’s hasty departure, and now his rather disingenuous wave-off, that raised a flag. A big one.

  Jenny sipped her coffee and let her thoughts bounce around for a few seconds before realizing something about that hijack story on her screen was lobbying for her attention. She re-read the details, noting the time that the airliner had reversed course without clearance was around 2100 Greenwich Mean Time, or “Zulu” as it was now called.

  A little more than three hours ago.

  Jenny sat bolt upright in her chair. “Three hours …”

  She leaned over suddenly, pulling the folder of papers they’d been working with all afternoon toward her, rifling through the notes to find a particular line.

  The one, singular answering burst from something out there that had accepted their mystery signal had come at 2052 Zulu.

  Now wh
en, exactly, did that airliner’s turn begin? How do I find out?”

  She re-read the screen before recalling the existence of the FAA’s Air Traffic System Command post. A quick search through a very restricted database turned up the duty officer’s number and she punched it in before realizing that a call from the National Security Agency, even on the best of days, could rattle cages and raise shields. And there was never a question about being on an NSA line alone—she had a monitor out there in the form of an active human or a passive datastream.

  Monitors be damned, she decided as the line was picked up.

  “Vint Hill, duty officer.”

  “Yes, hello. Jenny Reynolds here, at the Pentagon. A quick question, if I may.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “That Pangia flight we’re all watching, do you know precisely when it reversed course in Zulu time? I need to verify the start of the unauthorized turn.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you may ask … but I can’t tell you.”

  She could tell the woman on the other end was weighing suspicion against the relatively innocuous nature of the request.

  “All right. I think I understand that.”

  “If it helps, I didn’t call on our secure lines because this isn’t a classified question. I’m going for speed.”

  “Right. Hold on.” Jenny could hear papers being shuffled in the background before the answer came through. She issued a heartfelt thank you and hung up before any additional questions could be asked, comparing the two numbers and feeling a small shudder ripple up her back.

  Jesus God! Two minutes apart! First the answering burst, then two minutes later the turn. How many ‘Holy Shits!’ are there in the word ‘coincidence’?

  She sat back down, tracking the various components of the puzzle. A strange programming order repeats for at least half a day over clandestine satellite channels, apparently waiting for an answering burst. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency, with a straight face, tells her they know nothing about the transmissions or their purpose, and a team forms around the one NSA employee who discovered the mystery. Then, suddenly, there IS an answering burst, and the primary transmissions stop—and a civilian US flagged airliner, with passengers aboard, reverses course as if hijacked and heads back to the Middle East.

  And the DIA team leaves as soon as they hear.

  She could feel her face heating up in anger at being used and tossed aside by DIA’s Will Bronson, who undoubtedly had known all along whatever was happening was the military’s doing.

  But, wait a minute, she cautioned herself, he came over BEFORE the aircraft reversed course. Bronson was already here when the answering burst came through. Why stage such a charade if they really did know what was happening, who was sending the transmissions, and what was going to happen?Jenny sat back and tried to unleash her subconscious to work on the problem.

  That doesn’t make sense!

  But her conscious mind couldn’t let it go.

  No. There was no need for a charade. We called them. All he had to do was tell me to sit down and shut up, and I would have. He and his team were involved because there was something we stumbled on that they didn’t know about. But what?

  Wait … how many people were on his team? I never spoke to anyone back at Boling. But he did. So, maybe at least one or two.

  She pulled a legal pad over and started listing the items:

  * They didn’t know who was sending the signal.

  True. That’s why they needed my help in locating the source, which we never discovered.

  * They weren’t sure what the programming signal was trying to accomplish.

  Hmm. Maybe. They might have recognized it as a dangerous transmission doing exactly what I was afraid it was doing: programming some possibly airborne or orbiting machine.

  Her logic was getting tangled, she realized. Beyond the high probability that Bronson and his team came over because there was something they did not know, it was too murky to be sure of anything.

  But, as soon as they got word that …

  She stopped herself again. The connection she was making between the errant airliner and Bronson’s text message was a leap. No, it was worse. It was her tendency to connect dots that didn’t yet exist. She hadn’t even read the text he’d received. Maybe it had nothing whatsoever to do with the airliner. Maybe it was a laundry list, or his mother asking him to bring a quart of milk to dinner.

  But what if it did connect? The thought was rising like a silent tide. Maybe Will Bronson didn’t know what was going to happen, but obviously he and his people knew enough to get concerned when someone at NSA discovered a sky full of strange signals.

  Dammit, none of it was anything but speculation! She desperately wanted hard conclusions.

  Jenny let out a long sigh, unconsciously shaking her head as she reached for the water bottle always by her computer and took a long drink.

  Okay. Strict logic, girl. No intrigue. No leaps. No return to my paranoiac youth. Point one: This can’t involve some sort of secret planned military test or exercise or Bronson would never have come over here to begin with, let alone involve his minions back at Boling. They would have already known what those signals were. Point two: If they suddenly connected the dots between the answering radio burst and the airliner hijacking, and that prompted his hasty evacuation, that doesn’t prove the DOD is involved. Maybe it just means that they needed to get back and handle the intelligence questions that will inevitably follow the offshore hijack of an American aircraft.

  But there was a point three, and she couldn’t avoid thinking about it: What if whatever’s happening somehow involves some clandestine operation by our military that has to be hidden at all costs? The fact that we know about it means the operation is leaking, and may be spinning out of control.

  Jenny sat in silence for a minute reviewing the chain of thoughts. She drummed her fingers on the edge of the mouse pad, then flicked her hair back and picked up a pencil to chew on the eraser—a comforting habit since grade school that her father had hated. It angered her that Will Bronson hadn’t called her personally, and she blushed slightly at the thought that her pique might be more primal than professional.

  But, dammit, no matter how cute the man was, could he and his team and the DOD in general really be covering something up? Was that why they called Seth, to get him to quiet her down?

  This is stupid! she concluded, not entirely buying her own resolve. This is a hijacking, not something involving radioed orders to a drone. Nothing but coincidence.

  Jenny realized she was looking longingly at the phone, desperately wanting to call Seth for adult supervision. His security status wasn’t high enough to justify a classified line at home, and there was no way she was going to be reckless enough to talk about this on an open line, so …

  Suddenly she was fumbling through a personal address book in search of his home address, calculating just how long it was going to take to drive there, and just as quickly deciding that such a move was the sort of frightened, impulsive act that could seriously undermine his confidence in her. He’d said goodnight. Leave it alone.

  Yet, there were secrets beyond that computer screen begging to be unraveled.

  With a strange combination of excitement, apprehension, and resolve, she turned back to the keyboard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The White House (7:20 p.m. EST / 0020 Zulu)

  No matter how many times he entered the Situation Room, Walter Randolph felt the weight of history bearing down on him. A long procession of American presidents had grappled with unfolding crises in here, he thought, some more successfully than others. How many photos had he seen over the years of grim-faced men and women gathered around this table?

  How many times had he been one of them?

  Walter took a seat at the far end and opened his laptop, confirming the secure channel before signing in. At the same moment, James Bergen, the director of Central Intelligence, ro
unded the corner looking almost presidential himself, his custom-tailored suit devoid of even the hint of a wrinkle as he flashed his practiced smile the media so loved—a smile characterizing the country’s chief spook as an affable grandfather.

  “Walter! Sorry to keep you waiting. The president should be here shortly. He’s already been briefed that Moishe Lavi is a part of this equation.” Bergen shook Walter’s hand firmly, settling his five-foot-ten frame into the leather chair and waiting for the presidential aide to depart before turning to his chief deputy.

  “So, what have we got that I didn’t hear from you on the way over?”

  Randolph leaned toward him, keeping his voice low.

  “Two things. We know Mossad would never let Lavi out of their sight, but somehow Lavi managed to ditch his tail in Tel Aviv and was off the ground before the team shadowing him knew he was even headed to the airport. They’re stunned, I’m told, and knowing our Israeli friends, some heads will roll, but that means only Lavi loyalists are aboard that jet to keep an eye on him. In other words, no adult oversight.”

  “Not good, and not necessarily consistent with a trip to the US. What else?”

  “I have a very worrisome tip from … let’s just say a reliable asset in a sister agency, not that we would ever spy on each other.”

  “Perish the thought. I can’t let us do that. Go on.”

  “James, DIA’s deep into this already. Turns out they dispatched someone to go to NSA headquarters this morning, and we think they’re working on the same problem.”