The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

  For that, Barnard had no answer. Apparently, neither did any of the others.

  The screen went blank.

  • • •

  “The man of the hour,” David Lathrop said, pushing off from the wall where he had been leaning, out of camera range, while the teleconference went on. Possibly excepting Lew Casey, Barnard was closer to David Lathrop than he was to any other person in government. Lathrop was younger, but they had much in common, including war. Barnard’s had been Vietnam, Lathrop’s the First Gulf War, special operations. After the war, Lathrop migrated to the CIA. He completed several tours as a field operative, moved up to running his own stable of agents, and finally came in to serve as CIA’s senior liaison with BARDA.

  Barnard heaved up from behind his desk and motioned for Lathrop to follow him. They went to the big, comfortable leather chairs where Barnard had sat with Hallie. Barnard stopped at his credenza to pour black coffee for both of them. He handed a mug to Lathrop, who spoke:

  “Did you brief Rathor on the moonmilk mission?”

  “No. I assumed you had,” Barnard said. “But I wondered about it.”

  Lathrop studied his mug. “I didn’t. He seemed familiar with it, though.”

  “The president must have involved him before the telecon,” Barnard said.

  “Probably so. Given his contribution to O’Neil’s campaign, it wouldn’t be politic for the president to keep him in the dark, would it?”

  “Fifteen million, wasn’t it?” Barnard mused.

  “I heard more. And you know what? The same to Steeves. So I heard.” Lathrop grinned at Barnard over his coffee mug. Harold Steeves had been O’Neil’s Republican opponent in the last presidential election.

  “Covering all bases.”

  “Wish I could cover bases like that. You ever meet him?” Lathrop kept his expression neutral.

  “Rathor? Couple of times, official functions, nods and handshakes. He’s not known for making nice.” Barnard remembered mostly the small man’s big head and scrawny neck.

  “You hear stories. People calling him ‘Rat-whore’ and such.” Lathrop chuckled, shook his head. “Washington.”

  “Well, he came from Big Pharma. Not the most popular folks,” Barnard said.

  Lathrop nodded. “He did bring some of those Big Pharma people into O’Neil’s fold. That was probably more important than the money.”

  Barnard thought about it. “As important, maybe.”

  Lathrop laughed. “Point taken.”

  “O’Neil’s people spun it pretty well, don’t you think? ‘Another of the president’s open-armed attempts to reach across aisles and build bridges between business and government.’ Or whatever they said.”

  “Sure. But we both know O’Neil just wanted to keep a close eye on the bobble-headed little bastard.”

  Lathrop leaned back in his chair, took in and let out a deep breath.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t come by just to swap tales about the pols, Late.” His friend hated the name David, disliked Dave even more so. Since Phillips Exeter, people had called him Late, which was more than a little ironic because he never was late—was always early, in fact.

  “We have a problem, Don.”

  “What is it?” Barnard tried to brace himself for yet another piece of bad news. But even so, he was not prepared for what he heard.

  “Someone tried to send encrypted data out of BARDA.”

  “What?” Barnard shot forward in his seat. “What was it? How do you know that?”

  “I can’t answer the second question. As for the first, it was damned good encryption, so we don’t know yet. Analysts are trying to break it down now.”

  “Do we know who sent it?”

  “Not specifically. We just know it came out of BARDA.”

  “So it must have come from a computer here. That should be easy to track.”

  “That’s the thing. It didn’t come from a specific BARDA computer. It came directly from the organization’s mainframe. Someone was able to get a torpedo into BARDA’s central unit.”

  “You’d better explain that.”

  “BARDA and other ultrasecure sites use poison-pill comm configurations. The computers can only send to and receive from computers with similar configurations. Alien data, incoming or outgoing, is destroyed at the portal. That keeps unauthorized sources from receiving BARDA information, and also keeps outside sources from penetrating BARDA’s systems. But it is possible—theoretically—to get around that by coding to wrap the data in a protective capsule. I’m speaking metaphorically here. It’s data hidden inside other data, like explosive inside a torpedo casing. The information can then be received by an outside computer source and will survive while its self-destruct programming is deactivated.”

  “So we’re talking about a security breach. Here at BARDA.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, we had something like this happen over a year ago.”

  “Sure. Hallie Leland’s case. You thought it was all crap. Based on the available facts, I was inclined to agree.”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe we were wrong. Have you ever considered that?”

  Barnard started to retort, but stopped. “You don’t mean to suggest that Hallie was actually selling secrets?”

  Lathrop shook his head. “No. I believe, as you do, that somebody set her up, for reasons we don’t yet understand. Set us up, too. And if that’s the case, it’s possible the person is still in place. Anyway, she’s down in that cave.”

  “But you think the two incidents are connected.”

  “I suspect so, but I don’t know. And I don’t know how to know. But the important thing is to focus on what’s happening now.”

  “Can we get NSA on this?” Barnard could not tolerate the thought of some spy in his labs. It was repulsive, like discovering a cockroach in his morning bowl of oatmeal.

  “I would like to say yes. But NSA is brutally overtasked. Has been since 9/11. The Joint Chiefs are convinced this is some kind of bioterror attack and have all their critical assets pointed at AfPak.”

  “What do you suggest? For here at BARDA, I mean.”

  “Sometimes the best detection system is the human gut. Think about people. If something twitches when a name comes up, let me know. We can take it from there.”

  “Jesus, Late. I’ve got a hundred and fifty scientists and support people working here.”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy. And there’s something else. Something I haven’t shared with higher-ups or anyone else until just now. Could be very important but needs to stay between us until—” Lathrop’s phone vibrated. He pulled it from a vest pocket, looked, touched the screen. “Yes, Mr. Secretary. Yes, sir. I understand, sir. Right away. Yes, sir, I do understand that. I’m moving now. Yes, sir. Really, as in now, sir.”

  Lathrop stood up, pocketed the phone, gulped the last of his coffee, and hurried toward the door. “Secretary Mason,” he said, by way of explanation.

  “Late.” Something important had been left unsaid, clipped by an order from Hunter Mason, and Barnard didn’t like leaving loose ends. “Just a second.”

  But Lathrop was already at the door. He stopped, waved. “Gotta go, Don. The secretary is one man you do not ever want to keep waiting. I’ll brief you on this other thing ASAP, F2F only.” Face to face. Then he was out the door and Barnard heard him trotting down the hall, the brisk clicking of his steps like small bones cracking.

  Barnard went to his desk and took out a yellow legal pad. On his computer he brought up his department’s personnel roster. He wrote the first name on the list at the top of the pad:

  Abelson, Leonard M. Leo Abelson. Very tall, played basketball for Rutgers, amazing hands. Dedicated scientist. Good man. Barnard moved to the next person on the list.

  Twenty minutes later he opened his eyes and realized that he had dozed off while staring at the computer screen. He got up, walked around his desk, dropped to the floor, and fired off twenty push-ups. He s
tood up and slapped himself in the face, twice, hard, then sat down again. This was going to take a while, he knew, because the only way to find a mole was to dig deep.

  HALLIE WENT DOWN FIRST. SHE WAS AN EXPERIENCED ROCK climber and had been on this wall before, though with standard vertical gear, seat harnesses and rappel racks attached to stout, eleven-millimeter static caving rope. This descent would be very different indeed.

  She eased over the edge of the pit, facing toward the cave wall. She attached one foot to the rock, then the other, then both gloves. Five hundred feet of empty space yawned beneath her. If she fell, it would take six seconds to hit bottom, and those would be long seconds indeed unless a wall hit knocked her out. One good thing about such places in caves—the only good thing, really—was that she could not see the distant bottoms of pits such as this one. The darkness prevented her brain from lurching immediately into self-preservation mode, with all its tension and fear, which only made the climbing harder, even for one with her experience.

  She peeled her right foot off, lowered it twelve inches, and touched it to the wall again. When her boot made contact, it felt as though the rock were opening and closing around it, so secure was the bond between boot and rock. She eased her left foot down beside the right. Same thing. Brought her two hands down, one at a time.

  Hanging there without the security of a rope was unnerving, seeing bottom or no. A couple of years ago, she had free-soloed some rock climbs, including several challenging 5.12s, doing the routes without belayer or rope for protection, just to see how it felt. She had never been more than a hundred feet off the ground, but that was enough to kill her very dead if she came off. It had required every ounce of effort and concentration not to panic. Easily the most unpleasant experience on rock she had ever had. Some few climbers thrived on free soloing, Hallie knew, but the experience had taught her that she would never be one of them.

  Now she did as she had learned to do climbing in the world of light, concentrating on the rock inches in front of her face, breathing deeply and slowly, and using the big muscles in her legs. Foot, foot. Hand, hand. She was about fifty feet down when Bowman called out, “How’re you doing, Hallie?”

  “Good! These things are unbelievable, thank God.”

  “Thank DARPA.” He was being ironic, but she heard more relief in his voice than she’d expected, and that pleased her. “I’m going to start the others down. They’ll be on different lines, so don’t worry about rockfall.”

  The only tricky thing, she found, was peeling the gloves off the wall. If she didn’t do it at just the right angle, they wouldn’t let go. It was like peeling very sticky Velcro strips apart. After almost an hour, about halfway down, she stopped to catch her breath, hanging straight-armed from the glove attachments to let her skeleton take the weight and her muscles rest. At that moment Haight appeared fifteen feet to her left.

  “Hey. I am just plain blown away. Can y’all imagine builderin’ with these?”

  “I don’t think DARPA would be happy about that. But it occurred to me, too.”

  “Do y’all mind if I go on down?”

  “My guest.”

  Hallie was a good climber and knew it, but she also knew truly artistic work when she saw it. Haight was as smooth as a great ballroom dancer, so effortless did he make the descent seem. It was not effortless, she knew, not by a long shot, but the very best could make it look as though it were.

  Choosing caution over speed, Hallie took another half hour to cover the remaining 250 vertical feet. Finally, she stepped back onto the cave floor, moved away from the base of the cliff, and found a nice, waist-high boulder with a flat top to rest against. Haight, enthralled, was climbing back up. It was nice to have a few minutes alone here, away from the chatter and distractions of the team.

  She said to the cave spirit, “Chi Con Gui-Jao, es bueno estar con ustedes de nuevo.” It is good to be with you again. “Rezopor tu bendición y la promesa de no causar daños.” I ask for your blessing and promise no harm. Then she sat and waited.

  Fifteen minutes later, Cahner stepped down onto the cave floor. “Unbelievable.” Panting but obviously pleased, he came to sit beside her. “It makes one wonder what other things they’re doing at DARPA.” He paused. “You are an amazing climber.”

  “Thank you. It helps that I started as a teenager and loved it right away. But for a real artist, you have to watch Ron.”

  “He’s something. I caught glimpses of him while I was coming down.”

  “Hey, Al, does it seem to you like Rafael is taking a long time on the wall?”

  “Yes, now that you make mention of it.”

  “Nothing to do but wait, I guess.”

  They talked for another ten minutes before Arguello and Bowman dropped down together. Bowman hopped off the wall, then helped Arguello.

  When the two of them had joined the others, Haight asked, “How do we get the things off?”

  Bowman held up his two open hands in front of his chest, fingers splayed out. “Watch.” He touched the tips of his fingers and thumbs together. For a moment nothing happened; then the gloves appeared to inflate slightly. Bowman slipped them easily from his hands. “They neutralize each other’s forces when aligned in a certain way, as I just demonstrated. Go on, try it.”

  It felt to Hallie like the loosening of a blood pressure cuff, and the gloves did slip off easily after that. She watched while Bowman brought his feet together, touching the inside surfaces of his overshoes to each other. They loosed just as the gloves had, and he removed them with a light pull. It made her think of Dorothy, clicking her heels in The Wizard of Oz.

  “We need to keep moving,” Bowman told them. “Hallie, what’s the route from here?”

  “This level chamber we’re in now ends after a couple of hundred yards. There’s an exit passage we named Frankenstein’s Staircase because that’s what it’s like—a series of big shelves interrupted by vertical down-climbs. That runs for about a half mile. Then we hit Satan’s Anus.”

  “It looks like Satan’s Anus,” said Arguello when they arrived.

  He and the others were standing around a ragged-edged pool twenty feet in diameter through which black water swirled. On the pool’s far side, blank cave walls rose straight up, barring any farther progress on the surface.

  Bowman unwrapped a chocolate bar, broke off equal sections, and handed one to each of the others. After chewing a bite he looked around and said, “Anybody else feeling it?”

  “For sure,” Haight said. They two of them looked at the others.

  “Yep,” Hallie acknowledged.

  “Indeed,” Cahner said.

  “Oh, yes,” Arguello said.

  Hallie knew what “it” was. A slowly but steadily increasing sense of—how to describe it?—“dread” was the best word she could think of. It was the caving analogue to what climbers called exposure, by which they meant a fear of falling that grew sharper and harder to ignore with every vertical foot climbed. She had felt it before in very big caves and was feeling it now, a gnawing anxiety that kept her looking over one shoulder or the other and intensified with every foot they down-climbed. It was annoying but not a serious hazard—as long as the thing stayed in its cage. Broken free, it could devour sanity in an instant.

  “I always think it’s best to talk about such things,” Bowman said. “Helps defuse them.”

  “What exactly is happening?” Arguello asked.

  “Remember back at BARDA we talked about the Rapture?” Hallie said. “This is how it starts. It’s manageable now. But at some point it might not be. And it’s different for every person, so you need to pay very close attention to how you’re feeling, because once it hits, you go around the bend in two heartbeats and it’s really hard to come back. The key is to understand what’s going on before that happens.”

  “But what if one of us does feel it coming on?” Arguello asked. “What can be done?”

  “The only thing that helps is going up. So you’d have to asc
end on your own until you felt better and wait for the rest of us to pick you up on the way back out.”

  Arguello shuddered. “I do not know which would be worse,” he said. “Losing the mind or spending days alone in here waiting.”

  “Hobson’s choice,” Hallie said, and could think of nothing worth adding. Nor, apparently, could the others. They stood around quietly after that, munching snacks, drinking from their poly bottles. After ten minutes, she spoke again:

  “Let me brief you on the dive. We go in here. The entrance to the sump is like dropping down into a manhole for about twenty feet. Then the tunnel slopes at forty-five degrees, passing through the underwater face of that wall over there, drops to eighty feet, levels off, and continues straight for about two hundred feet. At that point, it makes a sharp turn to the right and narrows. If we were diving on conventional scuba, we’d have to doff our tanks and push them ahead of us. That’s how we got through on my first trip, and it was not fun. But with these new rebreathers, we should be able to pass through.”

  “Wait a second. How narrow is narrow?” Arguello sounded worried.

  “After the right turn, the tunnel shrinks to about five feet in diameter. Big enough to pass through with the packs—barely—but not big enough to turn around in. Any problems before the halfway point, you have to back your way out. I don’t recommend it. It stays level like that for three hundred feet, then rises at an easy angle for about five hundred feet. That long, slow ascent takes care of any decompression obligation, so you won’t want to hurry there. You’ll surface in a place we named Grand Central Cavern.”

  “About the rebreathers.” Bowman held up his own. “We briefed in Reynosa, but let’s do a quick check again. They have heads-up displays for all critical functions. Self-activating, triggered by submersion. Basically all you have to do is breathe and swim.”

  “A couple of other things,” Hallie said. “The silt in here is really bad. We don’t have fins so we’ll be pulling with our hands, which means the last to come through are going to have zero viz, or close to it. But I’ll be going first and running a safety line, so you can maintain contact with that.”