The Fourteenth Protocol_A Thriller

by Nathan Goodman

So she headed up the road into whatever it would bring. The world lay at her feet, and she wanted to drink it in. She pushed her way north through tiny Georgia towns with names like Cornelia, Walhalla, Pickens, Travelers Rest, and Landrum, slowly drinking in the smell of pine trees and simple quiet of life outside the city. As long as she was far away from the interstate, she was happy. After all, interstates were for suckers, for conformers.

  4

  Cade snapped out of his fixation about the use of the word emergency and picked up the phone. What did they want him to do about some server going haywire on the seventeenth floor? He’d never been called to go to seventeen, ever.

  “Cade Williams,” he said into the phone.

  “Williams? This is Johnston. I have a real situation here. Drop what you’re doing and get up here.”

  “Yes, sir. Ah, sir?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll meet you at the elevator on sixteen, and I’ll bring you up. Time to earn your pay, boy.”

  Cade hadn’t even gone to the bathroom yet. Well, this was shaping up to be a fun day. And by “fun” he meant “giant pain in the ass.”

  “They better have coffee on seventeen,” Cade said as he stood up.

  “SEVENTEEN?!” came the retort from Whitmore. “Come on, man. You and I both know there is no seventeenth floor. It doesn’t exist. It’s like a ghost or something.”

  “Well, time to find out. Do you think they have cream and sugar, or do you think I should bring my own? And maybe I should bring one of those little wooden stirrer things?” The sarcasm hung thick.

  “Oh. My. God,” said Whitmore. “Mr. Big Shot. ‘Just git yer ass up there, mister!’” Cade thought it was hilarious when Whitmore imitated the accent of Rupert Johnston. True southern redneck-speak combined with a lisp. Both of them knew Cade going up to seventeen was a big deal. No one on his floor had ever been asked up there.

  “Maybe I’ll be named CEO by the end of the day,” said Cade, breathing a little uneasy. I need to calm down. Man, it’s not as if Elvis is up there or something.

  By the time Cade walked the fifty feet from his desk into the lobby, Rupert Johnston was standing there, peering down at him. Rupert Johnston was every bit of six feet five inches tall, at least 220 pounds, and not exactly what you would call “portly” either. He was old to be sure, but it was like seeing a man made out of sinew and covered in striated leather. Cade had never met him in person and had never wanted to. His heavy-rimmed glasses and furrowed brow did not exactly invite conversation. Old guys like this look at me like I’m such a wuss, thought Cade, his eyes looking anywhere but into Johnston’s, where they would meet utter defeat.

  There was a story going around the office about Rupert Johnston. Cade never knew what to believe, but the story was that Johnston had snuck out of his mother’s farmhouse at the age of fifteen, hiked into town, and gone to the recruiting station. Vietnam was heating up in 1965, and Johnston was going to “git him some.” Some what? Cade wondered. Apparently he either fooled or scared the physician at the recruiting post enough to make him believe he was seventeen. His mother had no idea what had happened to him. To her, Rupert had just up and disappeared off the face of the earth. She even reported him as missing to the county sheriff. The poor old lady probably had a hell of a time raising that pain in the ass anyway.

  At any rate, at the time there were no computer systems that would alert police as to Johnston’s whereabouts. So no one knew where he was. His mom looked everywhere. By the time anyone thought to check with the armed services, Johnston had finished Marine Corp basic training at ParisIsland and was on a troop transport, somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean. He was not likely to be plucked off of the thing and brought home “because he didn’t have his momma’s permission.”

  Johnston stared at Cade for a moment, looking him up and down, and then just walked into the elevator. Cade followed as Johnston pressed the button for seventeen and turned to the digital touch screen panel to input his clearance code. Cade didn’t even glance in that direction. Can you imagine getting caught looking over Johnston’s shoulder? Cade shuddered at the thought. If Johnston suspected you of trying to spy his elevator clearance code, he’d probably give you a pounding to the top of your head, sending you through the elevator floor, or perhaps a spinning crane kick to the jaw. It wasn’t as if Cade wanted to sneak onto a restricted floor anyway. He didn’t like this asshole Johnston, but he liked keeping his job.

  The elevator opened, and to Cade’s surprise, the lobby of the seventeenth floor looked identical to the rest of the floors. Somehow he had envisioned armed Navy SEALs standing post, perhaps dressed in body amour and standing behind bulletproof glass. Kind of a letdown actually, he mused.

  They walked out, and Johnston swiped his keycard against the outer door. The door chirped in response, and they walked in. Johnston’s legs were as long as tent poles; Cade found it hard to keep pace. Johnston suddenly stopped and spun around, his finger in Cade’s face.

  “Now, look, what you see up here stays up here. You got me?”

  “Yes, sir,” was all Cade could muster.

  The racks of servers looked the same as on all the other floors. Then again, Cade hadn’t exactly expected an interior designer to come up with new and ergonomic designs for racks of black metal boxes with blinky lights on them. Several people Cade had never seen were milling around the server floor, some with iPads in hand. Man, they do a lot of monitoring up here. Or maybe that’s just because of the trouble they’re having at the moment. Hell, we don’t have iPads, Cade thought. As they walked towards the glass entry door to the server room, Cade noticed something odd. Down one of the rows of server racks were several men in business suits. That alone was out of place. None of the executive “suits” ever came down to the server floors. Why would they? Those guys stayed up on the executive floors with their espresso machines. Hell, it wouldn’t matter if the entire building had a sudden power spike that caused the servers to go haywire. The execs couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

  The absence of “suits” on server floors made Cade feel just a bit inferior. It was as if he’d detect a slight condescending look when the suits were seen with server guys. The suits looked at them as if they were “just the technical staff,” something easily replaced by calling Linda in human resources and saying, “Hey, go hire me a couple of new server geeks, okay?” It pissed Cade off.

  In this case, it looked like that group of suits was not happy. They were having what Cade’s mom would have sarcastically called “a discussion.” Cade only had a few “discussions” with his parents growing up. You know, the kind of discussion that ends with your mom saying, “Well, we’ll just wait until your father gets home.” Hearing that was never a good sign. Cade’s dad was not a violent man, but his disappointment would be evident. That was worse than getting smacked in the rear with a belt a couple of times. Cade always hated the idea of his dad being disappointed in him.

  As they got to the server floor, Cade couldn’t help wonder why they needed him up here. I mean, it’s not as if this floor is short-staffed or something. Look around. Plenty of non-suit-clad geeks to go around. Not like I know any of these guys, but you can’t tell me one of them couldn’t handle a simple code yellow on a blinky server box, he thought.

  Cade heard voices just over the sound of the server fans. Not just voices, but unhappy voices. An argument was in full swing. As they walked past one server row after another, the argument escalated. When they turned down the row where the suits were arguing, Cade could hear what was being said.

  “This isn’t about Tucson, goddammit!” Anger frothed from the voice.

  Another replied, “What the hell do you think we’re doing here! This ain’t the boy scouts!”

  “Ah hem.” Johnston cleared his throat to interrupt the argument. The suits looked up, and the argument ended abruptly. Whatever was being said was not supposed to be said in front of someone who doesn’t work up here, that’s for sure, thought Cade. Something about
the word Tucson stuck with him. The suits looked at him and one in particular; a kind of William-Macy-from-the-movie-Fargo-looking guy, stared at him through black-rimmed glasses. He struck Cade as kind of familiar-looking, but then again, Cade had seen that movie five hundred times or so. I bet people tell him he looks like a buzz-cut William Macy all the time. And then he slits their throats. The thought wasn’t as funny as he initially thought.

  Cade made eye contact for a second then looked down at his John Belushi black canvas high tops. He glanced at the server rack on his left, then back at his shoes with a certain unnerving feeling in his gut.

  In an abrupt introduction of sorts, Johnston pointed with his thumb and blurted, “Cade Williams, works on sixteen. He’s the resource we need to analyze this.”

  William Macy turned his attention to some papers in his hand.

  “No non-authorized personnel, goddammit.”

  Heat wafted from underneath Cade’s T-shirt and rose past his face. He was uncomfortable to say the least. William Macy looked a little like he’d stepped out of a piece of news footage, circa 1955, where you’d see clips of old civil rights marches. The footage was always in black and white. And there was always some pinhead being interviewed and saying something about how “The white race was dominant.” Cade didn’t like him immediately.

  “Now hold on, I thought you said the clearance was there,” said Johnston, pointing his finger at William Macy. Johnston wasn’t backing down, and it was hard to tell who was in charge. Whoever these guys were, they didn’t look like they would take crap off anyone. And they didn’t look like the typical executives at Thoughtstorm.

  “You know what I meant,” retorted William Macy, still not fully exposing his face. The only thing about him that didn’t look like business was the way his glasses perched halfway down his nose. It’s hard to look like a tough guy when you’ve got those sissy-looking glasses hanging off your face, Cade thought, wishing he could say that out loud.

  “We only meant the clearance was okay if we were in a no-options scenario,” said Macy as he put both hands on his hips, pulling back his jacket in the process. Cade’s eyes flashed as he noticed something attached to Macy’s right hip, and it darn sure wasn’t a cell phone case. For the first time, Cade’s uncomfortable feeling transformed into fear. What the hell was that, a holster? Cade looked back at his black canvas high tops. If it was a holster, Cade’s next question was, what the hell would some pinhead be concealing a gun up here for? He hoped no one noticed his reaction to the gun, but just for good measure, he glanced to the servers to his right and pretended to be interested.

  “Let me spell this out for you so you don’t miss nothin’,” said Johnston. “Based on the patterns we’re seein’, we’ve got about twenty-five minutes until the intermittent failures synchronize with one another. At that point, we have a total system collapse, and your e-mail stops going out. Is that plain enough for you?”

  Cade couldn’t believe what he just heard. System collapse? My God, what the hell is going on up here? The only time he’d ever seen a system collapse was when it was done on purpose. The year he started working at Thoughtstorm, Cade watched with a group of e-mail system admins as the chief technology officer entered the control room and announced he was going to perform the “mother of all system tests.” In the e-mail world, e-mail servers were supposed to never go down. Otherwise, you’d have lots of pissed off customers. Every piece of equipment is supposed to have a redundant backup, a second e-mail server paired with the first. During normal operation, the pair would work together as if they were one. In the event that one of them failed, which was certainly possible, the other would take up the slack. The customer would not know the difference because they wouldn’t even be aware of the outage.

  This was also how software upgrades on the e-mail servers were possible. One of the pair would be shut down and upgraded while the other took the full load. Then the process would be repeated on the other server. On the rare occasions when a server actually did fail, an alert would be sent to the admins on duty who could literally swap out the downed server for another waiting in reserve.

  The chief technology officer, Tim Wright, was never satisfied with that though. He kept asking the question, “Well, suppose we have an entire facility that goes down all at once? What’s going to take over the slack in that case?” The company had several server farms across the globe. Eventually, Wright convinced the execs to fund the development of a system that would allow one server farm to back up another. So if the facility in Atlanta went down, the one in Reno would instantly pick up all the slack. That was the theory anyway.

  Well, on this particular day, Wright announced that “Today was D-day.” He was going to take the entire Atlanta facility offline. This was, in fact, the mother of all system tests. To do a live shutdown on real equipment that was sending out real e-mail for real customers took balls. So Wright tripped the system. People who had spent their entire careers dreading just such an event held their breath as one was performed right in front of their eyes. All the servers in the entire Atlanta facility went dark. On the phone with Reno, Wright listened intently. You could tell the guy was about to pee himself. The Reno center was talking nonstop, giving updates. Within a few seconds, the Reno facility picked up all the slack of the e-mail sending. It had worked, and it had worked perfectly. Wright made his career that day; the guy was like a legend.

  William Macy looked at Johnston above the stupid glasses hanging from his nose. There was a protracted silence that felt like it went on for at least a minute. He nodded his consent, which apparently meant Cade was cleared to be on the elusive seventeenth floor.

  “It’s about damn time,” said Johnston, motioning to Cade. “Williams, get your ass over here.”

  Cade wasn’t used to being called by his last name, but he wasn’t about to tell Johnston that. Johnston was walking at high speed back to the work station that contained all the monitors displaying server status.

  “Look,” continued Johnston, “don’t pay attention to them assholes. They don’t add up to a pile of dried grits.” Cade wasn’t so sure about that. “Take a look at these logs. The e-mail being sent across these servers can’t be stopped, understand me? We gotta figure out what in the Sam Hill is the matter. For some reason, we’re seeing a power spike every thirty-nine seconds. It’s sending the server past its max load, and it’s really starting to piss me off.”

  Johnston’s description of the problem was bizarre. Cade had never seen something like this. His head swirled with questions. What would make the server load spike like that? Why was it happening every thirty-nine seconds? Who were the guys in suits, and why was one of them carrying a gun?

  “Every thirty-nine seconds exactly?” Cade said.

  Johnston just looked at him. “Did I stutter, boy?” Johnston gave Cade a look that reminded him of tenth grade at Chamblee High School when Mr. Butler, the vice principal, had seen Cade shove an envelope into the slot of a locker and then run off like a ten-year-old girl hyped up on sugar. Butler couldn’t decide if he wanted to laugh or resume his disciplinarian role to make Cade explain what was in that envelope. Cade was just dropping a note into a girl’s locker to tell her he liked her.

  “Sorry, dumb question,” he said. “Um, sir, has this pod ever shown this type of activity? I mean, what in the world are we sending in this e-mail job?”

  “We’re seein’ this type of activity repeat itself durin’ e-mail jobs about every two weeks. It cycles higher each time. And this time, it looks like it’s going to finally blow that pod apart like my daddy’s grain silo,” said Johnston, evading the question.

  “Sir, I’ve never seen a pattern like this. Are you sure you want me up here? I mean, surely there’s somebody more experienced who can . . .”

  Johnston cut him off. “You are who I need right now. Sit down, take a look. Be thorough. That pod can’t go down, son. It can’t.” Somewhere deep inside his southern accent was a sense of urgency far mor
e extreme than when a normal customer’s e-mail job was having trouble. No, this was something different.

  “But, sir, the redundant server will kick in if this box blows past max load. The e-mail job won’t skip a beat.”

  “There is no redundant backup.”

  Cade looked up at him. “That’s not possible, sir; Wright said every server would have a redundant . . .” But Johnston’s face made it clear there was no redundant server. It was as if he was saying you’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. This was not the sixteenth floor, this was someplace different, and Cade had no idea why.

  The suits turned in the opposite direction, and the argument heated. This time, over the drone of the servers, Cade couldn’t hear a word of it.

  5

  It was midafternoon and across town, Cade’s father, Cal Williams, was pulling out of Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta. The retired Navy pilot had a lot of friends still in active service at NAS Atlanta, the naval air station, which was located smack-dab in the middle of Dobbins. Since the base was primarily for reservists, much of it only came to life on the weekends. But, with all the activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea, there weren’t many pilots left on maneuvers inside US airspace.

  Cal always found an excuse to make his way over to the naval air station. He may have been retired, but he liked staying in touch with the guys. Cade had heard him say on more than one occasion that the only time he really felt alive was when he was being flung off the deck of a carrier and headed into harm’s way. Strange to hear that from the same man who had also told Cade how glad he was to have never killed a man, not directly anyway.

  Cal’s job as an Electronic Countermeasures Officer, known as ECMOs, was to run the electronic gear that jammed enemy radar and produced false radar trails, making the enemy think there were US planes in a spot where they weren’t.

  Cal always had the radio in his SUV tuned to WBS, so he could hear the news.