by J. G. Sandom
“I know of it,” she answered. “I’ve never been inside, of course. Few people have, other than the three hundred odd computer scientists and engineers who work there.”
“What’s Building 5300?” asked Decker.
Braun and Lulu exchanged a knowing glance. “Not many people with your hair color there,” Braun said. “But you’re NSA, aren’t you?”
“I do some freelance for the Fort on occasion.”
“What’s Building 5300?” Decker repeated.
“You’re a cryptanalyst,” Lulu replied. “You know how hard it is to break the Advanced Encryption Standard baked into most commercial email programs and Web browsers.”
Decker laughed. “Hard is an understatement. More like impossible. 128 is a bitch. Let alone the 192 or 256 bit algorithm. According to my friend Ivanov, a brute force attack—using a computer to try one possible combination after another to unlock the encryption—would take longer than...well, the age of the universe.”
“Which is about 13.73 x 109 years. He’s right, your friend,” said Braun. “For ordinary supercomputers. But the Cotter Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, doesn’t house an ordinary supercomputer.”
“What does that mean?”
“The DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, which you or anyone else can visit,” said Lulu, “has a Cray XT5 named Jaguar. It clocked in at 1.75 Petaflops and was named the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2009. Then, in 2010, China’s Tianhe or Milky Way computer took top honors at 2.57 Petaflops, which really freaked people out. Last count,” Lulu said, “China’s got 74 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, up from zero a decade ago, second only to us with 263. Of course, we’re kind of broke these days.”
“While the Chinese have almost limitless resources,” said Decker.
“Exactly. All my friends at MIT say that if the U.S. falls behind in supercomputing, we could soon lose our edge in all areas of science, in industries like oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research, the military. You name it.”
“Good. Then, we’ll be able to hack into their systems and rip off their copyrights for a change.” Decker laughed bleakly. “But what’s your point, Lulu?”
“Today, IBM has the fastest supercomputer, the Sequoia, running at more than 16 Petaflops.” Lulu took a step closer to Decker. She tilted her head. “But, while my friends at MIT are worried about stuff like oil and gas exploration, and mock nuclear testing, that’s not why we should be concerned. All these non-classified, public systems—they’re just the tip of the iceberg. They pale in comparison to what’s going on behind closed doors, at top-secret facilities like Building 5300. And not just here in the United States. All over the world.”
“We reached Exaflop more than a year ago,” said Braun. “That’s one quintillion or 1018 operations per second and expect to reach Zettaflop by the spring.”
Lulu visibly blanched. “That’s...I don’t know the word, but fucking amazing comes pretty close.”
“Those are two words,” said Braun. “And some think we’ll hit Yottaflop by the end of next year.”
“Now I get it,” said Decker. “The Bluffdale Data Center. All of those intercepts they’re storing in Utah. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: a whole bunch of data, which we’re clearly gathering, and then something fast enough to conduct brute-force attacks on the encrypted messages. Building 5300. A lot of that foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break it and we’ll be able to extrapolate how they did business—”
“And how they may do things in the future,” Lulu concluded.
“But that wasn’t the problem for Matt,” Braun continued. “That’s a good thing, at least that’s what we thought at the time.” He moved toward the front of the cabin and looked out the window. “The problem was, it isn’t just ‘government stuff.’ It’s everything. George W didn’t just authorize the installation of deep packet inspection systems at the telcos’ landing stations, the two dozen or so sites on the borders of the United States where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If they’d done that, they could have limited their eavesdropping to just international calls, which was all that was legal at the time. They didn’t. Instead, they chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction switches, in places like Bridgeton, Missouri, thus gaining access not only to international communications but to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. And not only telecom switches. Satellite receivers too, in places like Roaring Creek, Pennsylvania. Matt and I...well, that didn’t sit well with us. You know, Matt did a lot of fundraising for President Obama back in ’08. He was always left-leaning politically. And, not long thereafter, he abandoned work on his own project too. He gave up on refining his cyber-doppelgänger—his representative in cyberspace.”
“What happened to Zimmerman?” asked Lulu. “Who deflated his tire, Rutger? You know, don’t you?”
Just then, the kettle started to whistle and Braun moved back to the stove to remove it. With each step, his face fell out of humor, as if he were removing one mask after another. By the time he stood over the stove once again, he had slipped on the grimace of terror. As he fiddled with the kettle and tea, he kept glancing over at a corner of the cabin.
When Decker followed his gaze, he noticed a pair of funky-looking glasses in a box by the bed. Even from this distance, they looked like the VR goggles they’d spotted in Zimmerman’s home, with dark wraparound lenses and some kind of circuit board over the nose bridge. Two thin electrical cords dangled down to a couple of earbuds. Decker walked over to examine them more closely. “What are these for?” he asked him.
Braun began to rock back and forth. He returned the kettle to the stove. But he would not answer.
“Rutger,” said Lulu approaching him. “What is it? What’s wrong? Have you used those goggles before? What do they do?”
“Who killed Matt?” Decker asked. “I know you know, Rutger. Just tell us. We’ll protect you, I promise. Was it government? NSA? FBI? Or was it this private industry group, this Riptide?”
Then, Braun did something that neither of them had expected. The fear fell from his face, like scales from his eyes, and he started to laugh. “Do you know the one about René Descartes?” he asked out of nowhere.
“What? What are you talking about?” Decker said. Zimmerman’s assistant seemed to be losing his mind.
“He’s flying from Paris to New York, and the flight attendant comes up to him and says, Can I get you something, Monsieur Descartes? Some coffee, perhaps? Some tea or a drink?”
Lulu’s car suddenly roared. Decker glanced out the window. Somehow, it had started up on its own. He pulled out the Python...but there was no one to shoot at. The car roared again and suddenly lurched toward the cabin.
Decker found himself leaping through the air. He tackled Lulu from behind and they rolled to the floor just as the Ford crashed through the front of the cabin, directly through the bay window.
There was a terrible crash. Glass and splintered wood scattered about. They hit the wall, rolled, and Decker saw the car strike Braun full in the chest.
It drove him back to the rear of the cabin, crushing his chest and his face before punching right through in a blossom of blood.
The stove teetered and tipped, spilling the burning wood all over the rear of the cabin. Fire licked at the walls.
Decker grabbed Lulu and tore through the breach at the front of the cabin. They rolled onto the snow, turning just in time to see the structure burst into flames.
The last thing he saw was a murder of crows peppering the snow-covered branches above him. At the tips of the trees, the whole world went white.
CHAPTER 38
Friday, December 13
“John. John wake up. John!” Lulu shook Decker’s shoulders until he finally swam up through the darkness. “Oh, thank God.”
Decker rolled to his feet, reaching for his holster at the same time, but the Python was gone. Then, he
remembered. It had slipped form his grasp as he’d tried to save Lulu and now it was somewhere in what was left of Braun’s cabin, burning furiously only a few yards away. Decker grabbed Lulu by the hand and dragged her away from the wreckage.
“His car!” Decker said. He rushed to the side of the cabin. The tarpaulin covering Braun’s car was starting to melt. He pulled it away, revealing a starlight black 1964 Pontiac GTO.
“Holy shit,” Lulu said. She ripped open the driver side door and climbed in. There was no key in the ignition but it took her only a minute to reach down and hotwire the vehicle. Thankfully, it started up right away. “Get in.”
“Hell no,” said Decker. “Slide over. I’m driving this time.”
She did so and he jumped in beside her. Moments later, they were spinning and sliding down the snow-covered driveway.
Neither of them spoke for several minutes as Decker maneuvered the car back onto the main road heading south. He drove at breakneck speed for the next ten or fifteen miles until Lulu couldn’t take it any longer.
“Can’t you slow down for Christ’s sake? You’re going to get us both killed. Or is driving like a maniac part of your PTSD.”
“Who said I had PTSD?”
“It’s obvious,” she replied.
Decker glanced over at her once again. She looked terrified. He eased up on the pedal and the car slowed down to seventy.
“Thank you,” she said.
Decker laughed. He felt suddenly giddy. Must be all the adrenaline, he thought. “I guess it was your self-starter that—”
“Yep.
“IP-enabled?”
“Of course. But how they were able to put the car into drive...that I’m still trying to figure out. Poor Braun,” Lulu added. “I guess I owe you my life again. First Dino. Now this. It’s becoming a habit.”
“Forget it.”
“Forget it! You saved my life, Special Agent Decker. Don’t you know that old Chinese proverb: Save a life and you’re responsible for it?”
“Is that another one of your grandmother’s sayings? I don’t want to be responsible for your life,” he snapped back. Then, he softened. “I can barely be responsible for my own daughter’s life. Obviously.”
“It’s not your fault,” Lulu said. “Your daughter, I mean.”
“Isn’t it?” Decker laughed grimly. “I’m both her father and mother now. I’m all she’s got left. It’s my job to protect her. My job. But I didn’t. I brought Hammel into her life and he almost killed her.” He shook his head. “Forget it.” He turned to the left, trying to prevent Lulu from seeing the tears in his eyes. “I’m driving you back to Boston.”
“What? But...why? I thought we were...”
All of a sudden, Decker pulled the car off to the side of the road.
“You thought what?” He could feel himself growing angrier and angrier.
“That we were in this together.”
“We’re not in anything together. The longer you hang around me, the greater the chances that something bad’s going to happen to you. Just like Becca. I’m paid to take chances. You’re a college professor and part-time IC consultant.”
“I’m...” She looked out her side window. “What about you?” she continued. “What are you going to do?”
Decker shrugged. “I don’t know. But if Braun was right, if something happened to Zimmerman because of what he was doing at Building 5300, I have to find out what it was.”
“I can help you, John. You’re not a computer guy. You didn’t even know what an Exabyte was.”
“Of course I did. I just didn’t want Braun to know that I knew. I majored in math at Northwestern.”
Lulu laughed.
“If you can learn how to hotwire a car,” Decker added, “and I don’t even want to know how you learned how to do that, then I can figure this out. Actually,” he continued, “how did you learn how to—”
“Don’t ask. Let me just say that I had an interesting adolescence.”
“Fine.” Decker turned back to the steering wheel. He put the car into drive and slipped back onto the road. “I’m still taking you home. I don’t want to see anyone else getting hurt over me.”
They drove south on route 103 for another few miles, then picked up I-91. For a long time, neither of them said anything. Around noon, after crossing into Massachusetts and picking up Route 2E north of Greenfield, Lulu finally turned to Decker and said, “Why did Braun tell us that joke, the one about René Descartes?”
“You’ve been thinking about this the whole time?” Decker chuckled, shook his head. “I don’t know. Frankly, Braun seemed a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”
“He did, didn’t he? One minute lucid, articulate—the next...” She didn’t finish. “I know it, you know.”
“You know what?”
“That joke. I’ve heard it before. Back in college, I took some philosophy classes. So the flight attendant comes up to Descartes and says, Can I get you something? Some coffee, tea? Or a drink? And Descartes looks up and says, I think not. Then he vanishes.” She chuckled. “You know René Descartes, right? Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. The guy who founded analytic geometry.”
“I know him. And I get it. But so what? I mean, why did he tell us that joke? And what did he mean when he said he and Zimmerman were working on profiling?”
“Oh, now you need me again.”
“Whatever,” said Decker. He stepped on the gas. “If you don’t want to share your little theory, fine by me.”
“Scenario planning.”
“What?”
“You know. Games. Simulations. What was Zimmerman working on?”
“You mean before Riptide?”
“Yeah.”
“His cyber-doppelgänger project. Building personality profiles.”
“Exactly. And what’s Allied Data Systems all about.”
“Database marketing. Like Acxiom and Epsilon.”
“Exactly. Think about it. Remember how, after 9/11, everyone was clamoring for reasons why the hijackers weren’t identified earlier, especially since they’d done all these curious things right beforehand. Like taking flying lessons. Buying—”
“I remember.”
“ADS has more than twenty-five thousand servers processing more than fifty trillion—with a ‘t’—data transactions per year. Their databases contain information on five hundred million active consumers worldwide, with about fifteen hundred data points per consumer, and each person is linked to one of seventy or so socioeconomic clusters.”
“But that information is used in marketing stuff. Linking things like your online behaviors to purchasing preferences so that corporations—their clients—can sell you more stuff.”
“They also provided data to the IC on eleven of the nineteen hijackers right after 9/11.”
“I didn’t know that. So, you think Zimmerman was helping them integrate ADS data into their new Bluffdale facility, is that it? So that they could do scenario planning, or in an effort to find the next round of terrorists? Predictive modeling. Figuring out who was going to strike before they had a chance to do harm. But wouldn’t that be illegal? You’d have to data mine U.S. citizens, couple public and private datamarts. And then what are you going to do—arrest them before they do the crime? Besides, as you know, NSA has no purview over domestic spying. It’s forbidden.”
Lulu laughed. “You heard what Braun said about their telecom sniffers. They’re not just on our borders. They’re right in the middle of the U.S. of A.”
“But President Bush got into all kinds of trouble when he did that warrantless wiretapping. No matter how unlikely it is that a FISA judge turn down my request, I still have to secure permission before I go after someone domestically. Like with H2O2.”
“The rules were relaxed when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act back in ’08. Section 702 is pretty damned broad. They can sweep up all the data they want now, foreign and domestic, both IC-generated and public datamarts, do their predic
tive modeling, and target you and me, any of us, even if we’re not in contact with any agent overseas. And we can’t do a damned thing about it. We can’t even tell anyone we’ve been charged.” Lulu laughed.
“What’s so funny about that? You’re talking about blanket search and seizure. No more probable cause.”
“I’m laughing because you look so indignant. I guess you’ve never been followed around in some bodega at night because the night guard assumes—simply from the way that you look—that you’re going to walk off with some crappy bag of chips or a soda. Welcome, my brother, to the twenty-first century surveillance state.” Lulu turned and stared out the window. Finally, after a moment, she said, “You’re going to get us pulled over if you don’t take it easy.”
“We should get off the highway. Find a new car.”
“If you’d only let me turn on my iPhone,” said Lulu, “I could tell you exactly where the nearest exit is.”
Decker glanced over at her. “Yeah, and you’d be telling whoever is following us exactly where we are. Good idea.”
Lulu frowned. “Fine. No need for sarcasm.” She folded her arms.
“Look at you. You’re all itchy, like a heroin addict. You know,” Decker added, “I heard about a study the other day showing that people used to think losing their wedding band was the most stressful loss of a personal item. Now, of course, it’s their smartphone. Look how far we’ve come in just a few years.”
“You’re a luddite, John. A throwback. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t tossed my phone out the window already. Just like you trashed my Alienware laptop. You’re the one with a problem, John. You’re anti-technology.”
“I’m not anti-technology. I just don’t like turning it into my personal fetish.” He waved a hand at the dashboard. “It’s like the way we talk about cars. You have an accident and you say, ‘Hey, someone hit me!’ You don’t say, ‘Someone hit my car.’ We’re constantly anthropomorphizing technology. Same with Facebook Friends. I know people with thousands of ‘Friends,’ but they’re not really friends. They’re barely acquaintances. It’s reductive, depersonalizing, insulting to people. Like Wikipedia.”