The Keepers of the Library

by Glenn Cooper

  Laura came home, peeled off her rain-soaked coat, and sat down to take in the TV news.

  “How was your workout?” Greg asked.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “I slept all right. It’s the worrying.”

  “No news on your dad?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nick called,” Greg said. Their son, off at prep school, was the same age as Phillip. Nancy and Laura famously had been pregnant together, and Will had come close to having to choose between attending the birth of his first son or first grandson.

  “Everything okay?” Laura asked.

  “He’s fine. He just wanted to know if we’d heard anything about the guys.” Then he added, “When was the last time you talked to Nancy?”

  “Yesterday morning. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

  He nodded as if remembering. “How’d you say she sounded?”

  “Stressed. She’s worried out of her mind, but she can’t get the Director to let her fly to England.”

  “Because of China?” he asked, waving at the TV.

  “You know, it’s China! The whole thing sucks for everyone but you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked angrily.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m a mess.”

  “Yeah.”

  She rose. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  He couldn’t seem to let it pass and called after her, “Just because I’m finally making some money doesn’t make me a villain, you know.”

  “Whatever.” She sighed, closing the bedroom door.

  Greg’s NetPen chimed at the arrival of a new e-mail. He seemed inclined to ignore it, but after a while he snatched it off the coffee table and commanded it to read the message.

  The husky female voice he’d chosen for the function purred, “Sender: Phillip Piper. Subject: For Your Eyes Only and Laura’s Latin Eyes. Message: Encrypted. Sorry, read-mode unavailable.”

  Greg practically ran to his office and opened the e-mail on his work tablet. The body of the message was a jumble of machine code symbols with a header that read: tunnel protocol 1812.

  “What the hell?” he mumbled.

  He hit the command button on his NetPen and summoned the work number for his company’s IT consultant.

  “Hey, Nelson, it’s Greg.”

  A calm voice came over the mobile, “What’s up man?”

  “I got an encrypted e-mail with something called tunnel protocol 1812. How do I open it?”

  “It’s an open-protocol encryption tool but it’s heavy-duty. There’ve been some moves to ban it because bad guys use it for bad-guy shit, but it’s still out there. You need a key to open it.”

  “What key? I don’t have any key?”

  “Then you’re out of luck, man.”

  Greg raised his voice. “Nelson, this is a goddamn emergency. Life-and-death shit, okay? I need your help.”

  “I hear you, man. Why don’t you forward it to me, and I’ll take a look.”

  “No can do. We shouldn’t even be talking on the phone. Come over to my place.”

  “In Brooklyn?”

  “Jesus, Nelson, you’re in Manhattan. What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s like a different zip code, man.”

  “Take a cab. I need you here now.”

  Nelson Federman arrived an hour later bearing an irked expression on his young, chubby face. Greg had told Laura he was coming over to help him sort out a Net-site problem and she didn’t seem to think twice about his presence. Although the stress had pretty much blocked her ability to write, she kept going through the motions and was hunched over her ancient laptop.

  “Hey, Laura,” Nelson said. “Got to love the old-school keyboard.”

  “I can’t dictate,” she said. “I’m too old to change the way I write.”

  “I liked your last book. When’s the next one coming out?”

  Greg interrupted the chitchat. “Come on, Nelson. Time’s money,” and beckoned him into the office and shut the door.

  Nelson looked at the e-mail and rubbed his wispy goatee. “Look, the way these things work is there’s usually a prearranged key that both sender and receiver already know. This guy Phillip? He didn’t send you something in advance?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “There’s nothing I can do, man. This protocol is a 620-bit-key elliptic-curve algorithm. It may or may not be breakable. There’s been some chatter in the hacker universe that some spook agencies can break something this big, but you’d need some kind of next-gen monster computer to do it.” He looked at the work screen again, and said, “What do you make of the subject line?”

  Greg read it out loud. “For Your Eyes Only and Laura’s Latin Eyes. I don’t know what he means by Laura’s Latin Eyes.”

  “Well,” Nelson said triumphantly, “there’s your answer, dude. I’ll bet that’s the key.”

  “What? Laura’s Latin Eyes?”

  “If you’re going to the trouble to tunnel, you’re probably not putting the key out there. But this guy Phillip might be steering you to the right answer. Here, give me control of your machine.”

  Greg commanded a user change, and Nelson took over the voice commands, maneuvering to a hacker encryption site. He cut and pasted the e-mail message into the encryption engine and entered LaurasLatinEyes as the key.

  Decryption Failure.

  He tried some variants without success.

  “Okay, man, what’s cool about Laura’s eyes?”

  Greg thought for a few moments, and suddenly his face got animated. “They’re different colors! One’s blue and one’s brown! Her father’s always kidding her about it.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s try that.”

  He spent a while trying every word combination of one is blue and one is brown he could muster.

  Every time: Decryption Failure.

  Nelson furrowed his brow, and said, “Hey, I know, maybe we need to be using the Latin words for blue and brown.”

  Ten minutes later, they’d looked up the words and exhausted all the permutations of puteulanus and frons with no luck, and Nelson started getting antsy, looking overly obviously at his watch.

  Finally, Greg got out of his chair and opened the door, calling into the living room, “Laura. That thing with your eyes. Does it have a name?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Nelson is like obsessed with them.”

  “Hey!” Nelson said, defensively. “Leave me out of this.”

  She shouted through the door. “Glad you like them, Nelson. It’s a congenital condition called Heterochromia iridum.”

  Greg slammed the door and declared, “Latin!”

  With Greg’s help Nelson spelled out the term onto the log-in line, and said, “Enter.”

  Decryption Successful.

  There was a lag of a couple of seconds, and the gibberish message turned into words and at the end was a photo.

  Greg quickly stepped in front of the screen, blocking Nelson’s view. “You’re the best, Nelson. Double your bill and send it to me.”

  “Can’t I read it, man?”

  “You could. But then I’d have to kill you.”

  “I’m tripling my bill because you’re such an A-hole, Greg.”

  When he was gone, Greg sat down and read the e-mail, stuffed to the gills with anticipation.

  Greg:

  Phillip and I need your help. Do not tell anyone, including Laura and especially don’t tell Nancy for reasons I’ll explain later. We are being held hostage at a farm in Pinn, Cumbria, England. Latitude = 54.4142, Longitude = –2.3323. You’ve got to get on a flight tonight and get to Pinn by tomorrow afternoon. Lightburn Farm is notated on the UK Ordnance Survey maps. About a hundred yards east of the farmhouse and about thirty yards off the north side of the B6259 is a small stone outbuilding with an open front. Be inside that building at 5 P.M. GMT. I will come for you. Someone on the inside
is helping us. It may not be easy getting there undetected because the police have the farm surrounded, but you’re a cagey old journalist, so I’ve got faith. Look at the picture, Greg, and you’ll understand why you’re the only one I can trust. There’s a second Library. There is no Horizon.

  Will

  Blinking in disbelief, Greg looked at the image of a row of old bookcases containing a sea of leather-bound books. The ones nearest the camera were clearly marked: 2440.

  Officer Brent Wilson was relieved from his post manning a roadblock on the B6259 long enough to get a mug of hot tea from the incident van. While he sat on a folding chair in the night chill enjoying the break he heard his name being called.

  His Assistant Chief Constable was on the steps of the incident van summoning him in. Still clutching his mug he was led to the rear of the vehicle, ducking his head to avoid cracking his skull against the doorframes. The Chief Constable of the Cumbrian Authority, John Raab, had arrived from Penrith and was seated behind a desk.

  “Officer Wilson,” Raab said. “Have a seat and carry on with your tea. There’s a lazy wind blowing out there.”

  “Aye, there is, sir,” Wilson replied. “It’s brutal.”

  “I’m told you met Annie Locke and Will Piper when they first arrived in Kirkby Stephen.”

  “I did, aye.”

  “Tell me about them. Everything you can remember. I want to get a sense of how they might react under threatening conditions. I asked the MI5 chaps about her, and they acted like they’d be divulging national secrets.”

  “They were both very nice, very friendly I’d say. I met them at th’ station house and helped ’em print up some flyers with th’ boy’s picture so they could canvas th’ town.”

  “What about Piper? What were your impressions?”

  “Well, he’s a big fellow. Not a youngster, but I reckon he can handle himself. Far and away I thought that this was a man worried sick about ’is son.”

  “And Miss Locke?”

  “A go-getter, I suppose. Young and fit. Determined, I’d say, the type who you’d bet on t’ succeed in the Security Services.”

  “Pretty too.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “Piper’s apparently got a reputation as a ladies’ man. Any sign of a personal connection between them?”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “It might affect their judgment and decision making under dangerous conditions.”

  Officer Wilson still seemed flummoxed by the question. “I think they’d just met that morning, sir.”

  “Very well, finish your tea and resume your post.”

  When Wilson was gone, the Assistant Chief Constable asked Raab, “We haven’t attempted contact in about two hours. Would you like us to try again?”

  “Yes, why not? Use the bullhorn this time. Keep hectoring them every five to ten minutes but vary the interval for maximal annoyance like the old Chinese water torture, eh? If we’re not going to sleep tonight, neither should they.”

  “A farm like this, they could have enough provisions for a month. How long are we going to wait them out?”

  “It’s early days, Paul. We’re hardly talking about the Siege of Orleans. We’ve got them well surrounded. They’re not going anywhere. They haven’t made any demands at this point. MI5 are bringing in some night-vision equipment and some listening gear. The American embassy is keen to know whether Piper and his son are indeed inside as we presume they are. We’re going to keep our heads about us and take things step by step. And by the book.”

  Vice Chairman Yi had just finished giving a speech to the graduating class at the PLA Academy of Military Science in a western suburb of Beijing when his NetPen alerted him to an incoming encrypted request for a VidLink.

  He asked for a private room and the Academy’s Director ushered him into his office and left him there alone.

  Yi unfurled the NetPen’s screen and accepted the request. General Bo’s face filled the screen. Yi could tell immediately from the man’s wide eyes that the ordinarily unflappable general had something important to say.

  Yi listened to the report and signed off with a simple, “Thank you, General. I understand.”

  He closed his eyes in gratitude and felt them fill with tears. When he’d wiped them dry with his handkerchief he summoned his personal secretary on a VidLink and told her, “Tell General Secretary Wen’s people that I will be at his office in ten minutes. Tell them that I am coming to deliver the last straw.”

  Kenney stamped his feet against the frosty ground in a vain attempt to keep them warm. From time to time he’d part the bushes and take in the scene below through his night scope. He wasn’t expecting significant activity that night, but you never knew. It was a waiting game, something his unit was exceptionally good at, but he would have preferred to be doing his waiting in shorts and T-shirt weather.

  He became aware of his NetPen vibrating in his pocket. To maintain quiet, he put it on text mode and unfurled the screen. It was a priority message from Klepser, his head of electronic surveillance at Groom Lake. He sat down upon his rolled-up sleeping bag to read it.

  An encrypted message had been sent from Phillip Piper to Greg Davis with a cryptic message line. The send location was Lightburn Farm.

  Kenney knew damn well who Greg Davis was. Any historian of the humiliating debacle suffered by the watchers and Malcolm Frazier in 2010 knew that Davis was Piper’s conduit. The leaker. And now Piper was probably using his son’s mobile device to contact Davis again.

  What the hell was going on?

  Kenney scrambled up the hill forty yards to another clump of trees where he could talk softly without detection. He signaled to Lopez and Harper that everything was okay and called up Klepser on a VidLink.

  “What’s the level of encryption on that e-mail you just shot over?” Kenney asked.

  “Six hundred twenty bits.”

  “Shit. The key’s probably in the loopy subject line, don’t you think?”

  “Probably, but it won’t be easy to figure it out since it’s likely personalized.”

  “Like I said, shit.”

  “I think I can break it, chief.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve got a new algorithm I’ve been playing with. If you give me the authority to kick off everyone else using our systems I think I might have enough in-house computing power to crack it.”

  “You have my authority. If you can do it, I swear to God I’m going to fill your swimming pool with beer.”

  “I’ve got something else, chief. On a hunch, I put a tap on Davis’s autopays. Fifteen minutes ago he bought a ticket from JFK to Glasgow, leaving 19:00 EST today.”

  “Son, once that pool of yours is full I’m also going to drop a squad of cheerleaders into it.”

  Chapter 24

  Nancy knocked sharply on the door and waited. She was about to knock again when she heard someone stirring inside. Laura opened the door and froze.

  In a panicky voice, she said, “Oh my God, Nancy, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing! I was in New York, and I thought I’d stop by.”

  “Dad’s okay? And Phillip?”

  Nancy came in and unwound her wet scarf. “I’m sorry I scared you. I should have called first. There’s no change. They still don’t know if they’re at that farm. The MI5 people are keeping me in the loop pretty well but it’s hard not being there.”

  In the kitchen, Laura put the kettle on. It was already hot from her last brew and it went straight to a boil. Nancy noticed that Laura’s eyes were red.

  “Are you going?” Laura asked.

  “It’s crunch time,” Nancy said. “They want me to go to Beijing tomorrow with a DOJ delegation. Off the record, China’s threatening to break off diplomatic contact and this is supposed to be a last-ditch effort to convince them our government has nothing to do with the postcards.”

  “But none of their diplomats in Washington actually died, did they?”

  “It was a hoax
but they still think it was a provocation from our side. But, Laura, I can’t be going off to China with Phillip and Will in trouble. I just can’t do it.”

  “So you’re going to England instead?”

  She put her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “I’m this close. It’ll end my career but that’s the way it may have to go down.”

  She selected her herbal tea and while Laura poured, Nancy asked, “Is Greg here?”

  “You missed him by about a half an hour.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be for a few days.”

  Laura explained he’d finished a meeting with his IT consultant then rushed to the bedroom to pack a bag. He’d told her something came up, a big story that was going to help his business and that he’d have to go out of town for a while. He wouldn’t tell her what was happening or where he was going but told her he’d call and tell her what was going on as soon as he could.

  “Is that unusual for him?” Nancy asked.

  “Completely.” Laura started crying and Nancy realized her eyes must have been red for a while.

  “So talk to me, honey.”

  “We’ve had problems. I thought things were getting better but maybe I misread the situation. I think he’s having an affair.”

  “Do you have any evidence?”

  “Not really.”

  Nancy shook her head and said, “When a wife suspects her husband’s cheating she usually sneaks a few peeks at his e-mails and messages. Have you done that?”

  “I’d never. I mean, did you ever do that to Dad?”

  Nancy laughed. “I probably would have if your father ever used his phone or computer for more than paperweights. Do you know Greg’s e-mail password?”

  “No!” Laura said, horrified at the suggestion, but then seemed to warm to the idea, “But I don’t think he ever logs off.”

  “Look, honey, if you want to take a look, I’ll go along for moral support.”