The Patriot Paradox

by William Esmont

  Nigel beamed. “I just got back from a trip to the States,” he said, almost unable to contain himself. “I went climbing in Utah with a group of Americans, disabled people like myself. It was fabulous!”

  “Climbing? That’s wonderful, Nigel!” The mountains, Amanda knew, were one of Nigel’s great passions, and when the doctors had told him he would never be able to climb again, he had nearly given up on himself.

  “Do you have pictures?” she asked. “I’d love to see them sometime.”

  Nigel nodded enthusiastically. “I sure do.” His smile dimmed a bit. “But I know that’s not why you’re here today. What’s up?” He cocked his head in anticipation.

  Amanda pursed her lips. “I’d love nothing better than to talk about your trip, but I’m afraid you’re right. I’m here on business.”

  “I knew it.” He spun his chair and headed toward a sitting area outlined by three sleek, black leather couches. “Come!” he commanded, waving his hand.

  Chagrined, Amanda followed him across the cavernous room. She took a seat on the closest couch while he slid his chair into a gap between the other two, a space that gave him a command view of the entire room.

  “So?” he said, locking his wheels in place. “Let’s hear it.”

  Amanda pulled the memory card from her pocket and handed it across. “I’ve recently come into some information—through a friend of a friend.” Nigel maintained a poker face, waiting for her to provide some background.

  “I’ve done a little bit of analysis, a cursory glance really, and it’s… disturbing. It’s all classified, and it’s wrapped in some heavy-duty encryption. That’s why I brought it to you.” Nigel raised an eyebrow. The most predictable way to get him excited, she knew, was to give him a tough problem to solve. Encryption and classified data were the perfect incentive.

  “British?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No. American.”

  He seemed lost in thought for a moment, as if considering the source. “I assume you need the information last week?”

  Amanda blushed. “You assume correct. Most of the documents I examined refer to dates in the past couple of days. I’ve got a feeling something really big is about to go down.”

  She didn’t want to say too much. After all, she wasn’t acting as an agent of the government. At the same time, neither was he. She didn’t fear he would turn around and sell the information or return it to the CIA, but she had learned the hard way that people sometimes did strange, unexpected things.

  Nigel was silent for a moment, staring down at the memory card in his hand. Then, he looked up and met Amanda’s eyes. “This is personal, isn’t it?”

  Amanda looked away, biting back a crushing wave of despair. “Very. A good friend of mine died getting this information.”

  “Right. I’m sorry. Give me a minute to make a copy, and I’ll take a look.” He unlocked his chair and rolled out, heading toward his computer room. The only thing remaining was to negotiate a price for his services. Amanda hated that part.

  Not two minutes later, Nigel rolled back into the room. He handed her the original memory card. “Copying it was no problem,” he announced. “I’ve kicked off a stego-check, just in case.” The steganographic analyzer was a computer program that looked for hidden patterns in standard data. It was just one of a whole arsenal of tools he would employ to crack the data.

  “Thanks, Nigel. I really appreciate this. You have no idea.”

  He waved her off. “It’s nothing. I’ve been casting around for a new challenge. Things have been slow the past few months.” He really does look good, Amanda thought. Tanned. Rested. Almost glowing.

  “I guess the last thing to discuss is—”

  Nigel obviously knew where she was headed and stopped her in her tracks. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”

  “You’re a dear, Nigel,” she said, standing. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

  “Anything for you, Amanda.”

  “You’ve got my number?” He nodded.

  “In that case, I should get back on the road. It’s… complicated...”

  “Say no more...”

  “When this is over,” she added. “I want us to sit down with a good bottle of wine and look at your pictures.”

  “You can count on it.”

  Eighteen

  Mason checked up and down the street to verify Amanda was not circling. He counted to twenty, took a deep breath, and checked once more.

  “I’ll be right back,” he told the taxi driver, as he stepped into the muggy afternoon heat. He looked right, left, and then dashed across the street to the building, taking care to look as if he belonged there.

  While he had been waiting for Amanda to leave, he had been busy planning the next phase of the operation. As soon as he was done here, if he hadn’t heard from Helen or Jack, he intended to dispose of the taxi driver and arrange for a more anonymous mode of transportation, maybe a motorcycle. He felt a small twinge of guilt at his plans for the driver. The man seemed to get quite a kick out of following Kurt and Amanda around central London. It didn’t hurt that he saw Pound signs in his eyes either. If Mason were to pay him, which he had no intention of doing, his fare would be well over five hundred pounds by now. Oh, well. He served his purpose.

  Mason reached for the door handle, but let his hand fall short as he noticed the lobby was unmanned. Instead, he straightened, pasted a surprised look on his face, and pulled his phone from his pocket. He put it up to his ear and started to speak as if he had someone on the other end.

  “Hello,” he mouthed. Meanwhile, his eyes were busy recording the positions of the security cameras located in the lobby. He counted three small smoked domes in the ceiling, the same kind of cameras one would find in a Las Vegas casino.

  He bobbed his head, as if in an imaginary conversation. “Got it.” There may be audio surveillance, too, he thought. “Love you, too,” he said, making sure to enunciate every word in perfect British English.

  Mason entered the lobby and breathed a sigh of relief as the air conditioning dried the sweat on his forehead. He strolled to a bare granite desk located beside the elevator. A building directory hung over the desk. All of the floors had names except the top, he noted. That was all he needed.

  “Just drive,” he told the taxi driver, as he climbed into the back seat. “I don’t care where.” With a tired groan, the driver shifted into gear and pulled back into the never-ending flow of traffic.

  As soon as Mason felt the car pull forward, he took out his phone and typed a quick request to Helen. Architectural drawings. Blueprints. Utility information. The works.

  A plan was beginning to emerge.

  Nineteen

  Nigel opened the refrigerator under his desk and grabbed a bottle of mineral water. He twisted off the cap and flicked it into the trashcan a few feet away. He turned back to his screen.

  First things first, he thought. He wanted to run some analytical queries against Amanda’s data to get a feel for the context. His initial analysis hadn’t turned up anything of interest, but that didn’t mean that nothing was there. A full analysis would take several hours.

  He fired up several applications. The purpose of the first program was to perform a more thorough steganographic analysis of the unencrypted data. The second application would execute a series of increasingly aggressive decryption algorithms in parallel. Since the data originated in a classified environment, and the creators had never planned for its release, Nigel figured he had a good chance of cracking it. He was counting on it.

  If his lightweight decryption tool wasn’t able to crack the code, it would automatically send the offending files to his server farm in the other room, where yet another set of tools would perform a more thorough, brute force decryption attack.

  Once he had the software configured to his satisfaction, Nigel pressed the green button labeled Start. He took a long pull of his water. The next step was to perform some human anal
ysis on the data, to try to get a feel for the context.

  On his right was a nondescript box with four unlabeled push buttons that allowed him to switch between the American, British, and French government networks, as well as the public internet. He changed the network switch to the American setting and opened the data files.

  The first subdirectory contained personnel records from an organization deep within the CIA. He scanned through the files, noting the names and the organizational structure. It looked like a man named Jack Carson was running the show. He had twenty-four direct reports, ranging from field operatives to administrative staff. Nigel sketched out the structure on a legal pad.

  Next, he moved to a folder titled Games. He scanned through the contents, reading the executive summaries at the top of each document. These were war-game, far-flung scenarios created by the CIA in an effort to plan for future conflicts. The overall theme of the games revolved around removing Russia as a world player. They were recent, having all been drafted within the past five years. Interesting.

  He moved on. The next directory contained several hundred megabytes of exported email. He double-clicked on one, and his screen filled with gibberish. Encrypted. He made a note.

  He closed the email and clicked on another with the same result. “Damn it!” He cursed under his breath. Why isn’t this ever easy? He made a note to come back to the folder and moved on.

  Next was a series of videos. He watched a few; none were longer than a half-minute, and he quickly decided they didn’t contain anything of use. The next twenty minutes was more of the same. He came across a few more encrypted files, but for the most part, they were administrative documents of little value.

  Satisfied he had seen everything important, he checked the status of the decryption process. The system was busy chewing through the emails. That was encouraging. Still, there was nothing to do but wait. The progress bar at the bottom of his screen showed sixty percent. Nigel did the math in his head. That meant another hour or two before everything finished. He had some time to kill, some time to do a little digging of his own.

  His fingers danced across the keyboard as he navigated to a CIA search engine, plugged in ‘Jack Carson,’ and hit Enter. He got no results. Scratching his chin, Nigel shifted to a different search engine and tried again. Still nothing.

  He tried the next name on the list with the same result. “Hmmm.” This doesn’t make sense. Either these people don’t exist, or this is all an elaborate hoax.

  He had an idea. He switched the network back to the public internet and waited a moment as his computer reconfigured itself. Then he went to Google. He repeated his search, and on the fifth name, Michael Vetter, he got a hit—an obituary listing in the online edition of the Washington Post. Nigel clicked on the link and blazed through the article, absorbing every detail. He read it twice.

  Stunned, he leaned back in his chair and chewed on his lip. The obituary said Michael Vetter had died at the hands of a carjacker outside of Washington, DC. It listed his employer as the Department of Agriculture. Yeah, right, Nigel thought, flipping back to the personnel records.

  There was no doubt. This was the same man.

  He kept digging, his excitement mounting by the second.

  Twenty

  Something enormous boomed in the distance, right over the visible horizon. The air seemed to bristle, to pulse as if squeezed in a giant fist. The leading edge of a hazy shock wave became visible, racing towards Helen, following the curvature of the earth.

  She gasped and tried to run, but her feet wouldn’t move. Panicked, she looked down. Where are my feet?

  Ropy, thorn-studded vines encased her ankles, snaking up her calves, and disappearing into the skin of her thighs. What? They were moving. The vines, faster now, reached for her thighs. She looked up. The hard edge of the shock wave was almost upon her. She cried out.

  “Helen! Wake up, goddamn it!”

  Huh? The vines withered, disintegrated and took to the wind in a fine brown dust.

  Helen opened her eyes. Jack. He was standing over her, reaching for her shoulder.

  “Jack?” She groaned, rubbing her eyes with balled fists. My feet! She looked down. Her feet were okay. It was just a dream.

  “Good. You’re awake. We’ve got a situation,” Jack announced. “I need you at your desk.” He retreated to the door.

  Helen blinked and checked her watch. It was morning. Two hours ago, she had retreated to the crash tank, one of several sanctuaries scattered around the campus, built to accommodate staffers pulling long hours. The room was soundproof and featured a small single bed, a digital alarm clock, and a selection of snacks.

  Jack motioned for her to hurry.

  “What is it?” she asked, as she pushed herself into a sitting position.

  “Those searches you set up—we’ve had some hits. My screen lit up like a Christmas tree about twenty minutes ago.”

  Helen came wide-awake at this news. The previous day, she had injected a series of small software programs into the Rapier system. The process was similar to that used by a plumber when tracing a leaky pipe. Water, or information in this case, went in one end, and the plumber, or her software tools, looked for traces throughout the system. These traces served to identify what was going on inside, along with who was using it and how.

  Helen levered herself up and strode to the door. She pulled Jack down the hallway in her excitement. “That was fast! Do you have any idea who? Or where?”

  “London. As for who—I’ve got my suspicions, but I need you to confirm them.”

  She realized he was holding something back. Stopping in the middle of the hall, she turned and blocked him. “Who is it, Jack? I need to know.”

  “Not here,” he said, looking over her shoulder at a crowd of people coming their way.

  She held his gaze for a moment. “Okay.” She turned on her heel and continued down the hall to the secure door leading to their offices. She withdrew her badge from her pocket and pressed it up against a flat metal panel. The light turned green. She put her eye to the rubber-sheathed retina scanner, and a second light blinked green. Cleared, she leaned into the heavy door and pushed through, letting it swing shut behind her. Jack followed a moment later.

  Helen raced to her computer and logged in, fumbling her password on the first try.

  “Well?” Jack asked.

  “Hold on.” She flicked through the results, absorbing the reports as fast as she could. “Holy shit! It’s Nigel. Nigel Hawthorne.”

  Jack gritted his teeth. “That’s what I thought. Mason called while you were in the tank. I ran a check on the building he’s been watching, and it turns out Nigel Hawthorne owns the entire top floor.”

  Helen took a deep breath, trying to control her racing pulse. “Why didn’t you get me up earlier?”

  “I wanted to be sure.” This was a major development. If Nigel Hawthorne was involved, she had to move fast.

  She focused on the screen, skipping through the evidence of Nigel’s presence. “These are really specific, Jack.”

  “I know. He has our data.”

  “Uh huh. It’s the only way … Who’s he working for these days?”

  Jack shrugged. “Independent, last I heard.”

  Helen felt a growing unease with this news. She was good at her job, one of the best in the business. Nigel Hawthorne, however, was in a different league. He was a true master with deep ties to a host of intelligence services around the world. If he was working against them now, then it wouldn’t be long before he figured out the whole plan.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” she spat, the corners of her mouth turning down into a grim frown. There was only one way to fix this problem. He had to go. She would have to kill him.

  The problem was that too many people would notice Nigel’s death, people Helen didn’t want to count as enemies. If anyone traced the hit back to Jack, or worse, to her, there would be hell to pay. The thought chilled her to her core. But, it was the only option.
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  “I’ll take care of it,” she announced.

  Jack gave her a grim smile. “Burn this thing to the ground Helen. No trace.”

  She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “Consider it done.”

  She picked up the phone, already dialing Mason’s number as Jack walked away.

  While she waited for the call to connect, she thought of the last time she had spoken with Nigel. It was at a conference in Atlanta six months earlier where he had presented a brilliant paper on a new variant of quantum encryption. She had bumped into him at the airport on the way home and managed to spend a half hour picking his brain while they waited for their respective flights. She pushed the thoughts aside.

  “Hello?” Mason answered.

  “It’s me.”

  “What’s up?” She could hear a lot of noise in the background. It sounded like a pub.

  “You’ve got the green light.”

  The sound of glasses clinking and the low hum of conversation was all she could hear. Then, Mason came back, “Got it.”

  Helen forced her feelings about Nigel to the back of her mind, trying her best to put the mission first. She was only partly successful. “I’ll send you the logistics in a few minutes.” She hung up without waiting for an answer.

  With a sigh, she turned back to her computer and began preparing a targeting and logistics package. She had a long day ahead of her.

  Twenty-One

  Nigel rubbed his temples and squeezed his eyes shut, unable to believe what his computer was telling him. The decryption process was humming along, churning out new clear-text files every few seconds. As the files came out of his decryption program, another tool picked them up and integrated them into a cohesive picture.

  He had examined several of these connections, and now wished he hadn’t. They painted an undeniable picture of a complex and deadly web, originating in the CIA and stretching around the world to the Russian Federation. The planning required for such a far-reaching operation was staggering, the sort of coordinated effort he hadn’t seen in years.