The Sound of Echoes

by Eric Bernt

  “Why would it concern me? It means we’re safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “Ask the boss.” He motioned to Stenson’s car as it arrived in the parking lot with two other vehicles. One in front of him, one behind. There were two men inside each vehicle. Two escorted him inside the American Heritage Foundation and took up positions in the entrance while the other two checked in with the armed guards patrolling the perimeter.

  Stenson arrived in their office moments later. “The newbies haven’t found much of anything yet. Either of you done any better?”

  Greers replied, “We found the first vehicle, the one Drummond and McHenry had stolen in Philadelphia and used to remove Edward Parks and his device from the scene of the accident.”

  “Show me.”

  Greers brought up the location of the urgent care facility where Skylar had acquired the medical supplies Caitlin had purchased for her the night before. “A nurse at the facility reported her vehicle as stolen at six this morning, so now all teams are looking for a late-model Jeep Wagoneer.”

  Stenson processed the information. “You’re saying every one of our teams spent most of the night looking for the wrong vehicle.”

  Reluctantly, Greers responded, “Unfortunately, yes, sir.”

  Stenson turned to Trotter. “We need you to do what you do best, son. Clearly, somebody’s got to come up with an entirely different approach, and nobody does that better than you.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Trotter responded, although he was somewhat distracted.

  “What is it?”

  Hesitantly, Trotter motioned out the windows. “Sir, what’s going on out there?”

  “You mean the men with the automatic weapons?”

  “Has there been a threat we should know about?” He was clearly nervous.

  “The threat occurred yesterday, the moment Caitlin McCloskey walked out our door. Make no mistake, she’s declared war on you, me, and everything this institution stands for. Until the risk is neutralized, I am not taking any chances. And neither should you.” He continued down the hall, seeing no reason to mention that five well-trained, well-armed men had been murdered in his backyard the night before.

  Stenson entered the conference room, where Carter Harwood had worked through the night. The duplicate echo box and laptop were surrounded by several empty Rockstar Energy Drink cans and protein-bar wrappers. “You have something to play for me yet?” he asked impatiently.

  “Yes, indeed I do, sir. Sorry about the delay. The process was quite a bit more involved than I had anticipated.”

  “Play the conversation I want to hear and all will be forgiven.” He sat across the table from Harwood, clasping his hands in front of him.

  Harwood looked at the rendering of the Oval Office on the screen of his laptop, which was an exact duplicate of Eddie’s. The date read: July 23, 2016. “The first voice you hear will be Jessup Fields.” Harwood clicked “Play.”

  JESSUP FIELDS: The back door is embedded in such a way that it would take today’s best code-breaking system ten thousand years to crack it. Only the original programmer and my brother and I know how to access it.

  PRESIDENT: We’re talking about tens of thousands of voting machines. How can you manage all of them in such a short amount of time?

  JESSUP FIELDS: We don’t need to. The actual number is less than six percent of all devices. We’ll see the votes as they’re cast in real time, but only change the ones we need to swing the critical precincts.

  CHIEF OF STAFF: What about post-election auditing against paper records?

  Harwood quickly interjected, “The next voice is the older brother, Clayton.”

  CLAYTON FIELDS: We’ll know in advance which precincts are being audited. The ballots to match the modified electronic records will be swapped for the originals the moment they are picked up.

  There was a slight pause.

  PRESIDENT: How much am I going to win by?

  Followed by another pause.

  CLAYTON FIELDS: How much do you want to win by?

  PRESIDENT: As long as I win the popular vote, I don’t care.

  There was now a longer pause, as there often is before the final deal point is reached in any agreement.

  JESSUP FIELDS: Congratulations on your second term, Mr. President. I know we’re going to do great things together.

  Harwood clicked “Stop.” He looked across the table at Stenson as his boss processed what he had just heard. “You’ve outdone yourself, Harwood.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Stenson stood abruptly. “Send a copy of the conversation to my secure account.”

  Harwood deftly executed several quick commands on his keyboard. “Done.”

  “Now I want you to keep digging. It’s my understanding there have been a number of rather unsavory late-night meetings in our commander in chief’s office. Seems to be some kind of fetish. Search for anything that occurred after midnight.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harwood replied, doing his best to hide his exhaustion.

  Stenson exited the conference room, pausing in the doorway. “I have been looking forward to the phone call I’m about to make for quite a while.”

  CHAPTER 60

  AIR FORCE ONE

  SOMEWHERE OVER PENNSYLVANIA

  June 2, 8:21 a.m.

  The president was sound asleep beneath a blue quilt embroidered with the presidential seal when there were several knocks on his door. He stirred but didn’t awaken until the knocks became louder. Through the door, he heard the voice of his chief of staff, Ted Christian. “Sir, I’m sorry to wake you. It’s Ted.”

  The president was clearly annoyed. “It had better be important.” He slowly got up and put on his robe as he made his way to the door. He cracked it open slightly. “What?”

  “Bob Stenson is on the phone.”

  This gave the president pause. “Did he say it was urgent?”

  His chief of staff chose his words carefully. “He said it was a matter that couldn’t wait.”

  “Shit.”

  Two minutes later, he was sitting behind his desk in the private office. Christian sat across from him. The president answered the call on speakerphone. “Good morning, Bob.”

  “To you too, sir. How’s the flight?”

  “It would be better if I was still asleep. What the hell’s going on?” He tried not to sound panicked.

  “Who else is with you?”

  “My chief of staff, Ted Christian.”

  “Well, gentlemen, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  “I gather your guys found something?” Christian asked dubiously.

  “The satellite surveillance system is real, I’m afraid,” Stenson lied with conviction. “It appears to be the North Koreans fronting the Chinese, but we’re still confirming that part of it. We were able to interrupt their satellite signal, which should prevent ongoing surveillance for the time being, but it won’t last long.”

  Christian chimed in. “I checked with our best tech guys at NSA, NRO, and NGA, and all said space-based surveillance is years away, and probably decades.” He was referring to personnel from the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

  “Then it appears you need to get some better tech guys,” Stenson snapped. “Why don’t you listen to one of the conversations we were able to pull off their servers and then tell me how far away this technology is.”

  He played the conversation that had occurred inside the Oval Office on the morning of July 23, 2016. Both the president and his chief of staff immediately recognized their own voices. There was no mistaking the authenticity of what they were hearing. Both men slumped in their chairs, turning similar shades of white. The president placed his palms on his desk to steady himself. He gasped breathlessly, “Jesus Christ.”

  “Mother of . . .” Christian mumbled almost inaudibly. It was a rare moment in his career when he had been completely surprised
. This was a man who was widely considered one of the best political strategists in the game. He never missed a trick, because he considered every possible angle of a situation beforehand.

  The president struggled to speak. “Why haven’t they threatened to use this against us yet?”

  Stenson responded with a poker reference. “In hold ’em, when you have their nuts on the flop, you don’t push all in right away. You slow play it, as if waiting to see what the other guys are going to do before making your move.”

  “And sometimes, you push all in right away to make the other players think you might be bluffing,” Christian commented suggestively.

  “When you have the cards, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Stenson asked, clearly gloating.

  The president seemed to recognize that his chief of staff and Stenson were having a separate conversation buried within the one he was participating in, but he was too overwhelmed to draw attention to it. His head was spinning. “If word of this gets out, it would not only be the end of my administration; it could rattle the very foundation of our democracy itself.”

  “Let’s not go quite that far down the rabbit hole,” Christian said.

  “I’d say this time it’s justified,” Stenson answered. It was now obvious that he wanted to put the chief of staff in his place.

  “Bob, is there any way to fix this?” The president sounded defeated and desperate. Like a man willing to do anything he was told.

  “Unlikely, but I’ll pursue some back channels that may be open to us. I’ll let you know if I get any traction.”

  Christian knew that “back channels” meant he would be having a separate conversation with Stenson sometime later that day. Because the director of the American Heritage Foundation had given him a similar call shortly after the president and he had first met with the Fields brothers almost a year ago. Before then, Christian had heard of Stenson and his outfit. Hell, everyone in Washington had. But like most people, he considered the incredible stories attributed to Stenson as nothing more than political ghost tales that politicians and lobbyists liked to tell each other late at night to scare each other. There simply wasn’t any way a private entity could wield so much power and influence, and he had told the president as much. This is the United States of America we’re talking about here.

  It was only then that the president had finally admitted the extent of his relationship with Stenson. The AHF apparently knew things from the president’s past that they shouldn’t have, and they had miraculously made the most potentially damaging of the matters disappear. It was all quite mysterious, and almost mythical.

  Christian saw the world through a quantitative lens, which meant he didn’t trust those who used a more qualitative prism. He preferred measurable data, like the kind presented by Jessup and Clayton. The brothers had presented him a business proposition, which he then shared with the president, who voiced his concerns about how Stenson and his organization would feel about “going outside the family” for something as important as rigging the next election.

  The chief of staff had reminded his boss that the president of the United States didn’t have to fear anyone, especially not some privately funded, self-proclaimed intelligence don whose feathers might be ruffled by making a deal with a competitor.

  Apparently, he did.

  Christian didn’t believe that space-based surveillance was possible, but he also had no plausible explanation for how Stenson was just now able to play a conversation that had occurred inside the Oval Office nearly a year ago. The room was electronically swept for surveillance devices daily, so he knew that couldn’t be it. There had been no one else in the room during the meeting, but clearly, someone had recorded it. It wasn’t the president, and it wasn’t him. The only other two people who had been in the room were the Fields brothers, Jessup and Clayton. But why would either of them have recorded the meeting?

  The chief of staff hypothesized about a brewing split between the brothers that had somehow gotten out of hand, and one intended to destroy the other without regard for collateral damage. Or that one of them had become overly paranoid and recorded the conversation purely out of precaution, but had unwittingly lost possession of the recording or allowed it to be duplicated, which meant anyone with access to it could be behind this. There were too many scenarios with too many variables to significantly narrow down the list of possibilities, which was incredibly frustrating for him.

  Two things were certain: Christian had significantly underestimated Stenson and his American Heritage Foundation; and instead of being guaranteed a second term, the president might not be able to complete his first.

  And it was Christian’s fault.

  CHAPTER 61

  DAVID’S PLACE

  WOODSDALE, MARYLAND

  June 2, 8:28 a.m.

  The expressions on Lolo’s face vacillated from joy to bewilderment to confusion to sadness and fear as she listened to the last conversation she’d ever had with Helena, her deceased friend who had previously inhabited the room Eddie now occupied.

  The voices came from Eddie’s laptop, which he was operating. It was connected to the device Eddie called the echo box, which he had explained to her, but the name was about all she was able to comprehend. It was based on a science called acoustic archeology, which was difficult for her to follow.

  She understood that matter can change form—that ice can be melted into water and then heated into steam and then cooled back into ice—but that didn’t help her much with the concept of sound waves decaying into inaudible energy waves that could then be turned back into sound waves. In fact, the whole business of inaudible sound waves bouncing around the room made her feel claustrophobic. She imagined a thousand people talking all around her, making it difficult for her to hear her own thoughts, much less what anyone was saying. She pressed her hands to her ears, trying to make it stop.

  “I don’t want you to feel bad,” Eddie assured her, just like she had previously said to him. “Not ever. Most people don’t understand the science, even after I explain it as simply as I can.”

  “Don’t worry, there are a lot of things I don’t understand. I’ve gotten kind of used to it.” To make sense of the device, Lolo had decided to think of the echo box as “the play-back-anything box,” because that’s what it did. It could play back anything you wanted to hear. And right now, that was the voice of her beloved friend whom she could no longer speak with.

  HELENA: I’m scared, Lolo. Really, really scared.

  Her speech was slightly slurred, evidence of her cerebral palsy.

  LOLO: Don’t be scared, Helena. Because we’re friends and friends protect each other, don’t they?

  Butler and Skylar were awed by what they were hearing. They glanced at each other briefly, apparently realizing they shared a similar bond between them. Friends did protect each other.

  HELENA: I don’t think you can protect me from this. Not even Dr. Davenport can. He said the tumor is inop . . . inop . . . inop . . .

  LOLO: Inoperable.

  “She had trouble saying that word, inoperable,” Lolo commented as she listened to herself. “I don’t know why. It was just one of those things, I guess, but we all have some of those things, don’t we?”

  Eddie didn’t respond. He was too focused on the graphical representation of the echoes appearing on his computer screen.

  Lolo nodded, as if recognizing this was one of Eddie’s “things.”

  Helena was curled into a fetal position on the bed. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she hadn’t gotten out of bed yet. She clutched a pillow tightly to her chest. Her forehead was beaded with cold sweat. The young woman did not look well.

  Lolo sat beside her, dabbing her forehead with a cold washcloth. “Do you want to sing a song together like we sometimes do, me and you? We can sing any song you want.”

  “Not right now,” Helena struggled to answer. “My head kind of hurts.”

  “I can sing to you if you tell me what song you
want to hear.”

  Helena shook her head no. “Can you just hold my hand a little?”

  “Of course I can,” Lolo answered. She took Helena’s hand and held it tightly. “It’s cold. Your hand.”

  “I know,” she said, starting to shiver.

  “Are you hungry? I can make you something to eat.”

  Again, Helena shook her head no. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I want to help, Helena. I really do. But I don’t know what to do.”

  “You just being here helps. More than you know.”

  As they continued listening to the echoes of the heartrending scene, Skylar studied Lolo and smiled, almost imperceptibly. Mostly to herself, she said, “You understand more than you think.” Her expression made it clear that she was increasingly fascinated by Lolo and looked forward to learning more about her.

  As the echoes continued, Helena started to cry loudly. It was gut-wrenching.

  HELENA: Ow! It really hurts! My head!

  LOLO: Do you want your medicine?

  HELENA: I took the last of it. I don’t have any more. Make it stop. Please, make it stop. Please.

  LOLO: I’ll find Dr. Davenport. He has more medicine. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll get some for you.

  Her footsteps could be heard as she raced out of the room.

  Lolo stared at the floor as Eddie pressed “Stop.” The room grew very quiet. “When I came back, she couldn’t talk, Helena. Coma. She was in a coma. It’s when your brain won’t wake up. She looked dead, Helena. I felt bad. Then she died for real. And I felt more bad.” Tears ran down her cheeks, which she wiped on her sleeves.

  “You are crying sad tears, aren’t you?” Eddie asked as he finally looked up from the computer screen.

  She nodded. “Helena was my friend. I miss her. I liked talking to her. She was always nice and very clean. This room, very empty until you got here. Now not so empty inside.” She looked down as she placed her hand on her chest, then carefully looked up at Eddie, who had turned back toward his computer screen.