by Glenn Cooper
Sage’s new PA, a civilian who, rumor had it, had been a showgirl on the Strip, moved papers around her desk in a transparent attempt to appear busy. All service branches of the military had been operating under a mandate to be essentially paperless by 2025, but out-of-the-way bases like Area 51 weren’t visited by auditors and it wasn’t clear that Sage could operate all his productivity devices.
Kenney sat stiffly, watching the PA. She was reasonably ripe and attractive and wasn’t totally out of his age range. He stared intently at her sweater with radium eyes and concluded he wanted to make a move on her. Unless the old banana slug had already bitten off his penis inside her.
“Anyone in with him?” Kenney finally asked her.
“He’s on a conference call, Colonel,” she said. It sounded like a lie, but there was nothing he could do about it. He settled into a game. He was self-assured about his own attributes: dark, cocky features, lean, strong, and fast. He stared hard at her and tried to use mind control to make her look up. When she did, he’d hit her with a devilish little smile. Fifteen fidgety minutes passed. He needed to get back to the Truman Building. For the first time in his five years as head of watchers Kenney actually had some serious work to do.
Groom Lake Building 34, the Truman Building, had become a shadow of its former self. At its high-water mark, over 700 government employees made the daily commute by charter plane from Las Vegas to the remote desert base. Now there were 134, 16 of them watchers.
After the existence of the Library became a matter of public knowledge gawkers and the press gathered at the security fences at McCarran Airport focusing binoculars and long lenses on commuters. Some Area 51 employees were followed from the parking lots back to their homes in Las Vegas and surrounding suburbs, prompting the security force at Area 51, known not so affectionately as the watchers, to go into overdrive, monitoring employees to make sure they could not and did not leak highly classified information on birth and death dates from the Library database.
The watchers had been knocked on their heels by the Shackleton affair and its aftermath. Their chief, Malcolm Frazier, had been killed by Will Piper’s wife in an FBI shoot-out at the home of a dissident Area 51 retiree. Will Piper had gone to the press and blown the lid off of sixty-four years of maniacal secrecy. They had been disgraced, plain and simple. With an acting chief on board, an outsider dropped in by a Pentagon in crisis mode, they had been relegated to calling the Las Vegas police to deal with paparazzi chasing their analysts around Sin City.
But perhaps no one at Area 51 had been as affected as Roger Kenney. When the shit hit the fan, Kenney had only been a watcher for five years, but he’d already caught the eye of Malcolm Frazier in a big way. Frazier had latched onto the gung ho kid and put him on a promotion fast track. He’d given him plum assignments and habitually singled him out to the rest of the watchers for his accomplishments. Whenever Frazier had pulled a graveyard shift, he’d made sure that Kenney was there too and the two of them would drink coffee and trade dirty jokes all night long.
And Kenney had loved the attention he’d gotten from the big boss. Frazier had been a stickler for regs and a general hard-ass, but he was a man’s man who had the reputation of supporting his subordinates to the max and being a mentor to a chosen few. When Frazier died Kenney had cried like a baby, and he was still crying days later when he was one of the pallbearers at the funeral.
In the aftermath of his death, Kenney fell into a black hole. The medical officer at the base ordered him to see the Groom Lake psychiatrist. Kenney, being a man who’d rather puke than practice introspection, had been a reluctant participant in the exercise. The day he abruptly ended his therapy sessions was the day the shrink was wondering out loud whether Malcolm Frazier hadn’t perhaps become something of a father figure to the young man.
“Tell me about your father, Roger,” the shrink had asked.
“Never knew the man, Doc. The guy was nothing more than a sperm donor if you know what I mean. My mother raised me solo.”
“I see. Do you think there might be a link between your grief over Colonel Frazier’s death and your fatherless childhood?”
Kenney had shifted uncomfortably as if ants had invaded his shorts, and he suddenly rose. “This is voluntary, right? These sessions of ours,” he asked.
“Beyond the initial consult, yes. Completely voluntary. I’ve already certified your fitness for duty.”
“Then I am so out of here.”
In time, Kenney returned to his sunny ways, the hysteria waned at the base and life at Area 51 returned to a semblance of normality. While politicians and the courts decided on the fate of Will Piper’s leaked database, analysts got back to their routine. There were still sixteen years to the Horizon, still work to be done, and the watchers were as vital to the effort as they ever were.
The buzzwords at Area 51 and the Pentagon had always been research, planning, and resource allocation. The CIA and the military had used the Library as a tool since the early fifties, when, after its discovery beneath the ruins of medieval Vectis Abbey, a deal was struck between Winston Churchill and Harry Truman for the Americans to take control of the asset.
The Library, all seven hundred thousand volumes, was flown by the US Air Force from England to Washington. A nuclear-proof vault was built under the Nevada desert. It took twenty years to digitize all the forward-looking material. Before digitization, the books were precious. Afterward, the Library became largely ceremonial, a symbol of the awesome power of Area 51.
One of the early tasks for the staff at Area 51, a motley group of eggheads, braniacs, and military overlords, was figuring out how to exploit the data. After all, the ancient hide-bound books only contained names, written in their native alphabets, and dates of birth and death. Without correlates, the data was useless. Thus began a multidecade quest for virtually every digital and analog database in the world, birth records, phone records, bank, marital, utilities, employment records, land deeds, taxes, insurance data. North America was filled in first. Within twenty years Area 51 analysts had some form of address identifier for nearly 100 percent of the population. Europe followed suit. Asia, Africa, and South America took longer but the blank spaces on the globe got filled in eventually. Now, with 8 billion people in a world where virtually all personal data was digital, the picture was complete.
In the fifties and sixties, as soon as Area 51 analysts worked out the methodology for correlating names with addresses and geographic coordinates, attention turned to exploiting the data. Clearly, there were singular dates of national importance. A stunned Vice President Lyndon Johnson was notified on November 19 that John Fitzgerald Kennedy would die on November 22, 1963. He had four days to work out a succession plan smooth enough to steady a shaken world.
But there were bigger geopolitical treasures to mine. Outcomes could not be altered but large events that included fatalities could be predicted. If you could predict large events you could plan around them, budget for them, set policy, perhaps soften their blow or exploit their outcome. Ever-more-powerful computers processed data around the clock, searching for worldwide patterns. Area 51 analysts predicted the Korean War, the Chinese purges under Mao, the Vietnam War, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Gulf Wars, September 11, famines in Africa, natural disasters like floods and tsunamis. When Pakistan and India each launched a single nuclear missile against each other on March 25, 2023 resulting in over half a million casualties, the US government was as prepared for the disaster as humanly possible.
And from the moment the Library was discovered, the secrecy and integrity of the database was paramount. Because of that, the watchers were supreme. Their prime job was assuring that the existence of the database was never leaked and that the United States never lost its first-mover advantage. Furthermore, they were charged with keeping a tight lid on individual pieces of data. There were enormous concerns about what might occur if the public had access to any of it. Would society become altered or even paralyzed if people knew the day t
hey were going to die—or their wife, or their parents or children or friends? Would whole segments of the population succumb to a predeterminist funk and drop out of their productive routines thinking, what’s the point, everything’s already been decided? Would criminals commit more crimes if they knew they weren’t going to be killed on the day. All manner of unpleasant scenarios were on the table.
Over the years, the watchers kept the drum sealed. Yes, there were isolated incidents of an analyst here, a research assistant there, violating confidentiality and looking up the name of a family member or an enemy—and these incidents were dealt with in the most draconian ways, including, it was rumored, assassination, but there had never been anything like the Shackleton affair.
Post-Shackleton, there had been a shake-up—more of a purge, really—among the ranks of the watchers. Even more layers of security were added. Shackleton had been a high-level programmer, an expert in database security, a fox very much inside the chicken coop. The hole he exploited to purloin the database was plugged. But the US database was already out of their control, in the hands of The Washington Post’s lawyers. For that reason the government conducted the largest cyberinvestigation in its history to ascertain that the Post’s copy from Will Piper was the only one in existence. When the copy was returned following the Supreme Court ruling in the government’s favor, Area 51 was confident the situation had been contained. And in the years that followed, Kenney lived up to the potential that Malcolm Frazier had recognized in him and steadily rose through the ranks of the watchers until he got the promotion that put him behind Frazier’s old desk.
Sage’s secretary answered her phone. “The admiral will see you now,” she told Kenney.
Admiral Sage had a full beard. He was a portly throwback to the naval officers of a bygone era and seemed better suited to a nineteenth-century world of sailing the bounding main in brass buttons and gold braid than being a technocrat in the modern military.
He told Kenney to sit and grumbled at him, “You don’t want my job, Kenney. Believe me, you don’t want it.”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“I mean, I come here with the expectation it’s going to be a plum assignment: I preside over the last few years of database functionality, I mothball the base, send the Library packing to the Smithsonian, pick up my second star, and if the goddamned world doesn’t blow up next February, I retire to Rancho Mirage and play golf till I keel over. But that hasn’t happened, has it?”
“No, sir.”
“Instead, we get Doomsday II, and I’m in the middle of an international incident. The Pentagon is up my butt. The White House is up my butt. I’m late to supper every night, so my wife is up my butt. So who’s butt am I going to get up?”
“Mine, sir.”
“You’re damn right. Give me your report.”
My report, Kenney thought. You mean my Kabuki dance, where I pretend to bring new facts to the table and you pretend to listen.
As the investigation dragged on there were no new substantive facts, so Kenney had come to repeat himself, laboring to find a few incremental tidbits to extend the briefing long enough to save each party from the embarrassment of vacuous silence.
In the days after the appearance of the first tranche of postcards, the investigation had proceeded along two fronts. The FBI took the lead on reopening Doomsday I and the watchers spearheaded the search for a new Area 51 leak.
On the FBI side, the chain of custody of the Post’s copy of the database was reexamined and all living personnel who had been involved were reinterviewed. That list included Will Piper, Will’s son-in-law, Greg, and Nancy Piper. Nancy Piper who was now running the investigation made doubly sure that no punches were pulled with her or her family lest she be accused of a conflict of interest. The FBI ran the traps and concluded that their original 2011 investigation had been complete and proper, that no hard copy of the database had ever been printed out and that the Post’s only copy of Shackleton’s digital file had been returned to the government.
That threw the spotlight onto Area 51.
On the first day the case broke Kenney had assembled his cadre of watchers and addressed them in his easy Oklahoma drawl, “Okay, boys and girl,” he began—he had a single female on his staff, an ex–military policewoman. “I’d rather lick a cat’s ass than have to do this to you, but until further notice, you’re all mine, twenty-four/seven. Forget about weekends and vacations, forget about your precious kid’s softball game and your wife’s birthday. You are restricted to base. We are in emergency ops mode. You are going to work your tails off until we find the leaker or prove this is coming from outside our shop. Is that clear?”
Redmond, the lone woman had said, “I’m going to need to work out more babysitting.”
“Well, work it out then,” Kenney had snapped.
“Can I claim for it?”
“Are you dumb as a sack of hammers, Redmond? You know you can’t claim for that kind of shit.”
Lopez, a muscular former Ranger who lived in the same Las Vegas subdivision, had said, “Keisha can stay with us.”
“Aren’t we just one big happy family?” Kenney had muttered before continuing his briefing.
They started by running all 134 employees through lie-detector tests, including, by protocol, the watchers and the base commander. A half dozen tests came back equivocal and those lucky few got put through the ringer.
Then the forensic audits began. The database-security group, the algorithm jockeys, as Kenney referred to them, began scouring the servers for any sign of data intrusion they might have previously missed. Shackleton had been an algorithm jockey in his day so Kenney got permission to get a supernerd to check up on the nerds. In the old days, that would have been impossible since it took a year or more to grind through the Pentagon’s security clearance system before someone could be brought inside the Area 51 tent. Now that every ten-year-old in the world knew what went on at Groom Lake, it wasn’t a problem. On the recommendation of CIA database and encryption analysts, a professor of computational sciences from Stanford was airlifted in and given unfettered access to the system. He’d been at it since the first week but he still couldn’t find a damn thing.
Kenney believed in a multipronged approach. He didn’t understand database-security algorithms on a technical level but he believed he had a pretty good understanding of people. He started delving into personnel files looking for personal data and psychological nuggets that might add up to motive. That’s how he became focused on Frank Lim, one of Area 51’s China analysts.
Lim had his Area 51 twenty-five-year pin. He was a slight, unassuming man who did his job thoroughly, kept largely to himself and didn’t share much of his aboveground life with colleagues. As operations in the Truman Building wound down and head counts were progressively cut, the department that suffered the fewest hits was the China desk. With the collapse in the Russian economy and the hobbling of India in the wake of its nuclear disaster, China was the only country that really mattered to the US. Every geopolitical equation had the China factor on one side and the US factor on the other. So even though there was only one more year of functionality in the Library, the China database was still being milked every day.
The more Kenney dug into Frank Lim, the more he distrusted him. He was the only Chinese-American analyst. His parents had both been born in Taiwan. A branch of the Lim family was still there. He had a history of wiring money to cousins, ostensibly to help with their children’s education. One of his cousins was a prominent KMT nationalist politician who was a sharp advocate for full Taiwanese independence. Was it a huge stretch to think that Lim was behind some kind of act of political theater designed to intimidate the People’s Republic of China? Were the Doomsday postcards a veiled threat to the government, as in, “Your days are numbered too”? Besides, Lim was one of the Area 51 personnel with a less-than-pristine lie-detector-test result.
A week into the crisis, Kenney and Sage, with the backing of the CIA and th
e Pentagon, agreed to roll up Lim and place him on administrative leave. Subject to the draconian terms of his employment agreement with Groom Lake, the watchers did not need judicial clearance to search his personal computers and phone records. When you entered the murky world of Area 51 you voluntarily gave up due process. The search came up empty but he remained under suspicion, and his house in Henderson was under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
When Kenney described the mundane details of Lim’s visit of the day before to the supermarket and Home Depot, Sage seemed to perk up.
“How did he look?” the admiral asked.
“Look? I don’t know. I wasn’t personally on the surveillance,” Kenney replied testily.
“You get photos, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, let’s see them.”
Kenney pulled out his NetPen and unfurled its retractable screen. A couple of swipes later he had the images from the most-recent reconnaissance. He handed the device to Sage.
“Look at his face,” Sage said, peering at a close-up. “He looks like he’s hiding something.”
“That may well be,” Kenney said.
“Question him again. Do it personally.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sage closed his file folder, his way of showing a meeting was over. “On your way out, tell my PA I want to see her.”
I’ll bet you do, Kenney thought, you damned banana slug.
Inside the Truman Building Kenney strode into Elevator One and was about to push the –6 button for his office when he was seized by an urge he hadn’t had for years.
He stepped out before the doors closed and headed for the V Elevator. He summoned it with a special access key and entered the brushed-aluminum interior. There were only two buttons, G and V. He hit V and inserted his security card in the slot below the button. The doors closed, and he began the smooth sixty-foot descent.