by Brad Taylor
I said, “We’re missing something. That guy is there. We’re overlooking the footprints. Maybe he isn’t in a uniform. Maybe he’s a contract janitor or something like that.”
“None of those guys would have clearance. They’d have no access. There’s only one civilian contractor allowed on the floor, and he checked out.”
“They don’t have more than one contractor on Schriever with a clearance? That’s bullshit. The place is probably overrun with guys like that. It’s full of rocket scientists, and they aren’t in the military. Snowden was a contractor with a clearance, for God’s sake. Did you check them all? Sir, all we need is a thread. We can find him. Shut this thing down. But we need a thread, and it’s there. You guys are missing it.”
Kurt said, “We’re out of time to fish. The last check took thirty hours to complete. Get the computer up here. We’ll take a swing at it with our guys.”
Resigned, feeling failure all the way around, I said, “Roger all. We’re ready to fly right now. All I need is some help with customs. We’ll come right into Dulles.”
From the back of the room, Jennifer interrupted. “You guys are sure this traitor is on the inside?” She was holding the computer, with the clock ticking on the screen.
Kurt said, “Yeah. No way would he be able to access the GPS constellation otherwise. He’s on the inside. Why?”
She moved forward, bumping the team out of the way. “If he’s on the inside, he has a security clearance, right? He couldn’t do the work without one.”
Kurt leaned forward. “Yes? Why’s that matter?”
“Well, when I got my clearance they did a background check. I had to give them fingerprints.”
I said, “So what? We don’t have his.”
She held the computer forward and pointed at the biometric reader next to the keyboard. “Yes we do. We have his thumbprint right here.”
The team stood in silence for a moment; then Knuckles turned to the screen and said, “You still want to fire her?”
69
Arthur Booth banged on the aluminum screen door, causing a racket that startled him. He swiveled his head left and right in a panic, looking for a phantom government team to spring from the ground and handcuff him. He heard, “Calm down. I’m coming.”
When the inner door opened, a balding man with pale skin said, “Jesus Christ, Booth. You look like shit. What the hell is going on? Why on earth were you in Mexico? You said you were going to Canada to visit relatives.”
Booth pushed through the door, saying, “Pete, it’s too complicated to get into. You’re a lifesaver, though. I’ll pay you back the money as soon as I can get into my bank account. I lost my entire wallet.”
Booth walked past him, dragging a suitcase and a laptop. Pete said, “Why aren’t you staying at your place? I don’t get it. Why do you need to stay here?”
Booth sat at the kitchen table and booted up his laptop, the sweat on his neck mixing with his greasy hair. He said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I think there are people from Mexico who are hunting for me. I got mixed up in some bullshit down there. I was sweating bullets just getting clothes and my spare computer from my house.”
He saw Pete’s expression and hastily added, “Wait, wait. It’s not what you think. I didn’t do anything. I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. I said I was going to Canada because Boeing has a flag on travel to Mexico for anyone with a security clearance. Believe me, now I understand why. It’ll blow over, but I need some space. I can’t let Boeing know about this. I can’t lose my job.”
Pete said, “Well, you left at the absolute worst time. The AEP upgrade of the constellation is a mess. It keeps throwing out false timing signals, and everyone is going ballistic. We’ve been digging for days and can’t find out why. Of course, the damn Air Force is blaming Boeing. And Boeing is blaming us.”
Booth thought about his lost computer. About the clock ticking. He couldn’t remember exactly how long he’d delayed the disruption, but he knew full well he’d set it for a catastrophic failure. In the next few hours, America was going to go through a seizure. He no longer cared about punishing Wall Street or stopping drone attacks. All he was focused on now was saving his own pathetic skin.
When his aircraft had broken ten thousand feet, his first order of business was to slam a margarita, amazed that he was flying back to the United States alive. After that, he’d begun to think about what had occurred. Besides the weird kidnapper who’d taken him — a man who still gave him chills even inside the aircraft — he’d been tracked by a team of Americans. He’d wondered if they weren’t following the killer but knew that was too much to hope for, especially given that the kidnapper had almost tortured him to death trying figure out who they were. The man had been right, though. It had something to do with the POLARIS protocol, which meant they might know his identity.
He needed to redirect them. Get them worried about something else. Maybe the GPS failure would be enough, but he didn’t think so. The initial reports from his Anonymous contact had been that something was fishy with Grolier Recovery Services, and he wanted to know what had been found. He needed any ammunition he could get.
He said, “What’s your Wi-Fi password?”
“Chrystalbean pound pound. Capital C.” He leaned over and saw the website Booth pulled up. “Whoa. Stop right there. Don’t you start mucking around with those message boards. I’ve told you before that messing with those people will get your security clearance pulled, and I want no part of it.”
Exasperated, Booth said, “Boeing isn’t looking at your router data. Come on. I’m just trying to get some information that could help me.”
Pete folded his arms across his chest. “You can sleep here, but you will not pull me into whatever you have going on. The MAC address of your computer is tied to the MAC address of my router. Someone can see every ISP you hit, and those message boards are tracked by just about every government agency in existence. Not here.”
Booth slammed the laptop shut, the pressure he was under breaking the surface. “I’m just trying to chat with a buddy who’s doing some research for me. What sort of friend are you?”
Pete refused to back down. “The sort who’s willing to send you four thousand dollars on a fucking phone call. Go get some free Wi-Fi downtown.”
Booth was about to tell him to stick it up his ass and storm out, but the one rational part of his brain that still worked in his cesspool of panic realized it would only leave him exposed. And he could use a beer. Or twelve. Most of the bars in downtown Colorado Springs had free Wi-Fi.
He said, “Okay, okay. I’ll head to Tejon Street. You want to go? I’m buying.”
Pete laughed and said, “You mean with my money? Thanks, but I’ve still got some work to do. I’m trying to puzzle out how that timing signal is being twisted. You’ve still got a day of leave left. Better use it, because when you get back, it’s balls to the wall. If we can’t figure this GPS problem out, we’ll be looking for another job.”
70
The thermal showed the apartment was still empty. Which, given that we’d had eyes on the front gate leading into the parking lot for the past fifteen minutes, stood to reason. We were waiting on the sun to drop below the horizon, and I needed to ensure nobody entered the apartment in the meantime. There was one heat source in the target, and after analysis by someone smarter than me, it looked like it was a hamster. I think the wheel-spinning gave it away.
I looked at my watch, now synchronized to the ticking clock on the doomsday computer, and saw we had less than two hours before the GPS constellation went crazy. Less time than that to call off Operation Gimlet, because they wouldn’t want the aircraft to penetrate Syrian airspace if they weren’t going to drop the bombs. Which, from what I was reading about our chances, was what was about to happen.
We’d flown straight to Colorado Springs and met a cell of Taskforce computer experts, who’d set up an operations center in the Hampton Inn by the airport. W
ith the thumbprint it had taken less time than our flight from Mexico City to find our target: a contractor working for Boeing named Arthur Booth.
He’d taken some vacation time a few days before, ostensibly visiting relatives in Canada. The Taskforce had gone to work, tracking his credit cards and cell phone usage. They’d found cellular data and credit purchases that tied Booth to El Paso earlier in the month, but the recent history was blank. He hadn’t used his cell phone or credit cards in days. The last purchase they could find had been for one round-trip ticket to Mexico City from Denver, returning yesterday. He had not used the second leg, which made perfect sense, given I’d seen him at the museum earlier that day running like a girl.
With Arthur Booth’s personal digital trail a dead end, the Taskforce dug deeper, scanning official domestic databases, probing with a wide net to find some link that would lead them to the target, and had gotten lucky. Arthur Booth had gone through immigration at Dallas earlier today, with onward travel to Colorado Springs.
Originally ordered to bring the computer to the might of the Taskforce fifty-pound heads in Washington, DC, we’d been redirected midflight to Colorado Springs with a dual purpose. The hacking cell would go to work on the computer here, in a makeshift operations center, and we would go after Booth.
We’d gotten a dry hole at his apartment, but I hoped something inside there would give us a clue as to where he had gone. Ordinarily, we’d just have sat there waiting, for days if necessary, instead of attempting a break-and-enter, but we didn’t have that luxury this time.
Which is exactly why we hadn’t simply alerted domestic authorities, claiming Booth was a serial killer or something else that would get him on every beat cop’s radar screen. We couldn’t break him free from the police without raising an enormous flag as to who we were and why we wanted him. The decision had been made to do a domestic Taskforce operation, against a US citizen, which was a big decision indeed.
Operating domestically was forbidden by the Taskforce charter, precisely because we had the ability to break quite a few constitutional protections afforded the average United States citizen. We didn’t have congressional oversight like the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. Without this scrutiny, the Taskforce had the capacity to grow into something cancerous, becoming the very threat we were created to fight, and thus the decision had been made to keep it off US soil. Keep the beast at bay in the hinterlands, as it were, doing evil so good may come.
We had operated domestically in the past, but against foreign targets, as we had in the Dallas airport. We’d conducted only one operation domestically against a US citizen, but the threat had been overwhelming — a domestic terrorist attack to destroy our power grid — and it was judged that the Taskforce was the lone tool that could solve the problem. I remembered well the enormous debate surrounding that mission, because I’d been at the heart of it. We had succeeded, and apparently, that had made this debate a little easier.
I was happy with the verdict, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me a little unease. With only the Oversight Council as a decision maker, there was the threat of hasty judgments based on emotion or an imperfect intelligence picture, something I’d seen happen only six months ago on another operation, causing Kurt Hale to offer his resignation.
A problem to worry about later. Right now, I had an asshole on the loose that I needed to capture to stop a catastrophe, and little time to worry about any constitutional niceties.
Although there was still a glow of twilight, I judged it dark enough to execute. I turned to Jennifer. “You ready?”
“Yeah. I see my route. I’ll use the balconies.”
The building was a four-story brick structure with a single access point on the ground floor, secured with a keypad. From our reconnaissance earlier, we’d learned that the entrance could be unlocked from the apartments themselves, as we’d seen a pizza delivery guy speak into a box, then pull the door open. That was now Jennifer’s mission.
Dressed like Catwoman, in a black Lycra Under Armour shirt and leggings that fit like a second skin, she was going to scale to the fourth-floor apartment, break in through the sliding glass door, then hit the entrance button.
I said, “Get moving. We’re wasting time.”
She exited the vehicle; scurried through the foliage, avoiding the pool of light from a streetlamp; and reached the corner of the building.
A voice in the backseat said, “Who is that chick? I didn’t think we had any female operators.”
His name was Bartholomew Creedwater, and he was supposedly the best computer guy the Taskforce had. He’d probably never once left his little hole inside Taskforce headquarters in DC, and he was treating this whole operation as the time of his life.
Beside him, Decoy said, “I didn’t think so either, until I saw her do some shooting in Mexico.”
I said, “She’s a monkey. She can climb just about anything, which comes in handy during situations like this.”
Standing on the railing of the bottom balcony, Jennifer leapt up and grasped the concrete of the balcony above. From there, she began to move like a lizard, seeming to flow upward against gravity.
Creedwater said, “That is positively amazing. Where’d she come from?”
I said, “Cirque du Soleil. She’s a gymnast.”
We continued to watch her climb, Creedwater acting like he was in a spy movie, his mouth hanging open.
He said, “I wonder if she likes computer geeks.”
What? I looked at him, and I swear I thought he was constructing some fantasy in his head. “Hey, keep focused on the mission. I didn’t drag you out here so you could watch a show.”
We were bringing him and his skills into the apartment to survey whatever electronic stuff was available, hoping to find a lead. His mission ended at a keyboard. He snapped his mouth closed, embarrassed.
Decoy said, “Yeah, Creed. Trust me, you don’t want to go after Jennifer. It’ll make some people mad.”
I snapped my head toward him, wondering. Is that because I almost bit his head off for what he’s said about Jennifer in the past? Or does he know? Did Knuckles talk?
Decoy had a little grin on his face, giving nothing away.
Through my earpiece I heard, “On the balcony.”
I said, “Roger,” signaled Creed in the backseat, and opened the door to the car.
We walked with purpose to the front door of the complex, leaving Decoy behind as early warning in case Booth came back while we were inside.
We reached the entrance just as Jennifer said, “I’m in.”
71
We waited less than thirty seconds before hearing the door buzz. A minute later, we were inside the apartment. It was your typical furnished rental, with a cheap sofa, chipped end tables, and absolutely no personal effects. No pictures on the walls, books, or anything else. Sitting next to a wide-screen TV, I saw an Alienware desktop computer that looked like it belonged to NASA. I pointed to it and said, “First things first, get all electronic devices next to that computer. Creed, get to work.”
He laid a backpack on the ground and began pulling out all sorts of black-magic devices. Jennifer went into the bedroom.
I watched Creed attack the computer, fascinated that anyone could do what he was doing. I was pretty tech savvy, but this guy was on a whole different level. He had the monitor running script that looked like the Matrix but seemed to understand what he was reading.
I said, “Why can’t you guys do this with the laptop we brought?”
Still working, he said, “We scanned it, and there are indicators of little booby traps threaded throughout. The guy who created that program is pretty damn good with code. Trust me, I could get into the computer, but I’m afraid that I’ll cause the software program to self-destruct. We lose that thing, and we’ll have no way to turn off the threat. Given enough time, I could do it, but not in two hours.”
Story of my life.
Thirty minutes later he was
done. In addition to the desktop, he’d gone through two tablets and an iPod. He’d collated a list of potential leads from various threads in each system. Known contacts, repeated bills from restaurants, multiple ISP hits, and anything else that stood out. I contacted the Taskforce and had them start their analysis. Given the time crunch, I needed some focus on where to begin. They’d be making an educated guess, but it was better than starting at the first name on the list and moving down.
Working the screen, Creed said, “This guy has been a very bad boy. He’s accessed just about every hacking message board in the world.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I used to do the same thing. Before I saw the light with the Taskforce.”
“Can you work it back? Find out specifically who he talked to?”
“Yeah. Given some time, I could figure it out. Maybe not a name, but I could get the ISP location.” He leaned into the screen and said, “I’ve also got one MAC address unaccounted for.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I have all of his router information, and included in that are MAC addresses that accessed his Wi-Fi. I can account for the target laptop you captured, these tablets, and the iPod, but there’s one more MAC address that’s not tied to anything we know of. Could just have been someone visiting, but maybe it’s a lead.”
“What are you talking about? How’s that a lead?”
He started stroking the keys to the desktop, saying, “The MAC is the identification the computer uses to talk to Wi-Fi. It’s specific to that computer, and we might be able to locate it.”
“How?”
“There’s a company called Skyhook. They’ve mapped close to a billion Wi-Fi hotspots, basically by driving down roads and sucking in signals. If that MAC is talking to a Wi-Fi hotspot in their database, it’ll give us a location.”