“E-mail goes in and out?” DeLuca asked.
“It does, but nothing gets in or out without being fully scrutinized and analyzed first.”
“By human beings or computers?”
“Both,” Huston said. “The computers suggest what to look at. We have the most secure communications in the world, Mr. DeLuca.”
“And this is all done on your computers in-house?” DeLuca asked. “No exceptions?”
“Command heads can override it,” Huston said. “But that’s only four people.”
“General Koenig?” Huston nodded.
“It was General Koenig’s team that designed the system,” Huston added.
“Does he look over your shoulder much?” DeLuca asked. “How much of his time does he spend in The Mountain and how much in building A?”
Huston had to think.
“I’d guess maybe 50 percent in each,” Huston said. “But I’m not all that familiar with the general’s schedule. And no, he does not look over my shoulder. The general is an excellent manager and part of that is being an able delegater. He expects a great deal from his people and he gets it.”
DeLuca wondered what made Huston so protective of Koenig. Such protective loyalty wasn’t so unusual in the Army, particularly among ass suckers and sycophants.
“So this system flagged Cheryl Escavedo’s keystrokes… ?”
“Not precisely,” Huston said. “In fact, we were running a system challenge, not unlike the exercise going on right now. Operation Holdfast, it was called, testing for structural failure and the back-up protocols that kick in when the firewall is either down or breached.”
“When was this?” DeLuca asked.
“November 9, between 0436 and 0445 hours.”
“Testing the night shift?”
“There’s no such thing as a night shift in The Mountain,” Huston said. “After you’re inside for more than forty-eight hours, you lose track of time. We have to force people to take downtime or to sleep because the body’s sidereal mechanisms need photoperiodicity to operate normally. At any rate, what I was beginning to say was that for a brief period of time, between when the system was down and before the back-up protocols kicked in, we were vulnerable.”
“For how long?”
“I’d say no more than a minute,” Huston said. “And even then, we looked pretty close at everything that happened during that minute.”
“This was when she copied the files?”
“It was the most likely opportunity,” Huston said. “Maybe the only one. We didn’t catch it until months later, when analysts at NSA were reviewing the data from Holdfast and noticed that the clock on one of the computers had reset itself. Nobody made much of it until someone looking for anomalies noticed the clock had reset itself by months rather than minutes. What we think happened was that Sergeant Escavedo changed the clock on her computer, during that sixty-second window of opportunity, copied the files to either diskettes or CDs, probably CDs, but backdated that information so that the surveillance program wouldn’t search for it when it came back on line—why look where you think you’ve already looked?”
“Backdated to when?”
“To 0437 hours, May 9,” Huston said. “Six months to the day, hour, and one minute more, which is how long the system archives information before making the decision what to keep and what to delete, and this would have been something the program would have deleted.”
“Isn’t deleted material recoverable?” DeLuca asked.
“On your PC back home, yes, but the way we delete things, no.”
“Just so that I understand,” DeLuca said, “what you’re saying is that you have no idea what was taken, or how much of it is missing. And that it couldn’t have been accidental or inadvertent—it was planned. Do I have that right?”
“You do, unfortunately,” Huston said. “But it had to physically leave The Mountain. It didn’t go out electronically. So she could only take as much as she could copy in sixty seconds. We think two CDs at the most, or one diskette. And people aren’t supposed to be able to do that, take anything out, but apparently portal security can be compromised.”
“Or charmed,” DeLuca said. “Like that episode of Seinfeld, where he was dating the blonde who was so attractive she could talk her way out of any traffic violation. Which I have to say, from all my years as a policeman, is truer than I’d care to admit.”
Major Huston’s face was a blank.
“You never watched Seinfeld?”
“That would be a television program?” Huston inquired.
“Uh huh,” DeLuca said, wondering if Huston was putting him on, though he was too humorless to put him on. “Used to be. It’s in reruns now.”
“We don’t own a television,” Huston said. “We home school.”
“Well,” DeLuca said. “I’m not trying to be sexist here, but I’d imagine a woman as attractive as Cheryl Escavedo could get over on a lot of guys, including security guards.”
“God certainly favored her with great physical beauty,” Huston said. “Matched by her native intelligence. We thought her a person of all-around good character. Everyone did.”
DeLuca was fishing around to see if he could pick up any sense that Huston might have had the hots for Cheryl Escavedo, but it didn’t appear that Major Huston knew what the hots were.
“Was she dating anybody, that you knew of?” he asked. “Any personal problems? Alcohol? Drug habits? Credit card debt?” Huston shook his head at each question. “And she was transferred to MEPS a week later? November 16, right?”
“That’s right,” Huston said.
“Did she have advance warning that Holdfast was coming? Change her schedule to make sure she was here when it happened? Anything like that?”
“I don’t think so,” Huston said. “I knew, and of course the command officers knew. I don’t know how she could have known, other than by intuition.”
“Maybe she had something in mind and was just waiting for the right moment,” DeLuca said. “What sort of things did she have access to, through her job?”
“Pretty much everything,” Huston said. “Just because something is archived doesn’t mean it’s declassified. It could have been anything from SATOP codes to intel to DARPA stuff to budget reports.”
“And you keep non-CMAFS files, too?”
“We have secure NSA servers,” Huston said. “But not even I know what’s in them. All we do there is dust and polish.”
“So Escavedo didn’t have access either?”
“No way,” Huston said.
“May I ask why she was transferred? With all her awards and the NCO of the Year thing, I’d think she’d be the kind of person you’d want to keep around.”
“She was,” Huston said. “She asked to be transferred. The first time she asked, she was denied, but when she asked again, we tried to accommodate her. Working inside The Mountain gets to some people. We want to keep qualified personnel, but we also like to keep a supply of fresh faces flowing through, just to avoid stagnation.”
“Why MEPS? That seems like a step down.”
“She wanted to be in Albuquerque, as I recall,” Huston said. “She had friends there, or family. I’m not sure.”
“What did you do when you suspected files had been copied? You reported the missing files—then what happened?”
“I believe CID in Albuquerque asked her to come in,” Huston said. “It wasn’t handled properly. I’m not saying she was spying or stealing anything, but if someone is doing that, you don’t set up an appointment for them to come in and confess, do you? When they went to get her, she was gone. Her laptop was missing, but she forgot to clear her printer buffer, so we were able to print a copy of the last document she’d written.”
He reached behind him and handed DeLuca a piece of paper from a manila folder, a letter printed on plain white paper. It was addressed to a Dr. Burgess, at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It said:
Dear Dr. Burgess,
&nbs
p; I was hoping that we could meet in person. I’ve been working for several years at the Cheyenne Mountain facility in Colorado Springs, and I have information I think you might be interested in. I will try calling you again, but I’ll be hard to reach so I’ll have to call you. I look forward to speaking with you.
“Who’s Dr. Burgess?” DeLuca asked.
“Dr. Penelope Burgess,” Major Huston said. “She’s a microbiologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A frequent speaker on the dangers of weaponizing space. She says she never heard of Cheryl Escavedo or received any letters. That’s all I know. Apparently the military police have talked to her. And as far as I know, the next thing they did was call you. Is that right? And that’s really about all I know.”
“Can I keep this?” DeLuca asked.
“It’s yours,” Huston said.
“Can you show me where she worked?”
Huston led him to a corner cubicle in a large room full of cubicles, computers, servers, and storage units. There were two desks in the cubicle, one empty, the other occupied by a lieutenant named Joyce Reznick, who Huston said had worked with Cheryl Escavedo for the last few months that she’d been stationed at Cheyenne Mountain. Huston introduced DeLuca as being from CI and told Reznick to answer any questions he asked. At the same time, instead of leaving them alone, Huston stood looking over DeLuca’s shoulder. DeLuca considered asking him to leave but changed his mind.
“Would you say you knew her fairly well?” DeLuca asked the lieutenant. “Did you socialize in your off hours?”
“We’d meet up at birthday parties and that sort of thing,” Reznick said. “I’m not sure I’d say we were close, but I guess I knew her. A little bit.”
“And she had friends in Albuquerque?” DeLuca said. “That was why she transferred?”
“I guess,” Reznick said.
“Do you know where the rest of her family is?”
“Her parents died in a car accident when she was young,” Reznick said. “She was raised by her uncle. He lives in Las Vegas, I think.”
“Did she have any money problems, that you knew of?”
“CID already asked me that,” Reznick said. “I didn’t know about anything. I know she hated gambling. And she didn’t drink or do anything like that. She was a really good person.”
“How about boyfriends?” DeLuca asked. “Was she ever engaged? Seeing anybody?”
“I don’t know about that,” Reznick said. “She worked all the time. I think she was seeing an older man for a while but it didn’t work out.”
“What makes you say that? Did she say anything specific?”
Reznick shook her head.
“She was very private about that sort of thing,” Reznick said.
“What makes you think it was an older man?”
“I don’t know. That’s just the impression I had. I think one weekend she said she and her friend went skiing and that he had a house. I guess I just assumed anybody who had a house had to be older.”
“Do you remember where they might have gone skiing?”
Reznick shook her head.
“Thanks for your help,” DeLuca said, handing her his card and writing the number of his SATphone on the back of it. “Will you be sure to call me if you think of anything? Major Huston—would that be all right?”
“Certainly,” Huston said. “Not a problem.”
Not a problem, unless you knew all your keystrokes were being twinned and scanned by a surveillance program, and your phone was probably tapped, and your activities were being watched as well.
DeLuca had been met again by Sergeant Davies, who asked him if he was finding his way around and if he wanted to grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria. He declined. She left him with a group of impatient people waiting for the bus to the parking lot and checking their watches. It was still snowing outside, the sky an opaque gray. He’d gone about halfway to his car when he heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Lieutenant Joyce Reznick, hurrying to catch up with him.
“Will you walk with me?” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “I could get in big trouble if anybody knew I was talking to you.”
“Not from me, you can’t,” DeLuca said. “I can protect you if you need protection. I have close friends in very high places.”
“Not high enough,” she said. “Cheryl didn’t want to be transferred. They made her leave. Do you really think she’d prefer processing new recruits in Albuquerque to working here? And don’t let Major Huston tell you how much he loved Cheryl—he thought she’d only gotten to where she was because the Army needed to have a Native American on the program. He called her a pagan once, to her face.”
“I appreciate you telling me this,” DeLuca said.
“I think they wanted to shut her up,” Reznick said. “I think she’d found out about something they didn’t want her to know.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“I don’t know,” Reznick said. “And I don’t know about the boyfriend stuff. I couldn’t tell you this inside, but she told me she was gay. At least she let on that way to other people because there were so many men trying to ask her out that she had to do something to make them leave her alone. Though in the military, you can’t come right out and say you’re gay—don’t ask and don’t tell. Don’t ask for your rights and don’t tell anybody when they’ve been abridged.”
“Why did she tell you, then?” DeLuca asked. “It’s all right, I promise you. Any conversation you have with me is completely protected.”
“So you think,” she said. Her paranoia was palpable. “She told me because I’m gay. And now that I’ve told you, I could be court-martialed. I’ll just have to trust you.”
“What men?” DeLuca asked. “Who was interested in her?”
“Who wasn’t?” Reznick said. “The Mountain is a pretty catty place, though the official term for it is ‘close-knit community.’ You hear rumors all the time.”
“Rumors?” DeLuca said. “About what? Or who?”
“That she was having an affair, with a married officer,” Reznick said. “But you hear things like that about everybody. I heard that about me. And frankly, when I did, I let it spread because it meant people were more likely to believe my partner was just my roommate.”
“So you think Cheryl talking about a boyfriend was just a cover story?” DeLuca said.
“I don’t know,” Reznick said. “Either that or pretending she was gay was a cover story. I can usually tell, and if you ask me, I don’t think she was. Gay.”
“Why do you think she took the files?” he asked. “Assuming she took them.”
“I don’t know,” Reznick said, “but knowing Cheryl, I’m sure she had to have had a very good reason. She loved this country … Colonel…”
“Agent DeLuca,” he told her.
“She loved it more than anybody I’ve ever known. And she considered herself one of the original owners. But she loved what the military had done for her, too. It had given her everything. She would never betray it. I know that. That’s all I can say. I have to go now.”
He considered her words as he started his car. He wondered if he wanted to drive to Albuquerque tonight or wait for the storm to pass—he’d wait to see what the conditions were like, once he got down the mountain.
In the Shijingshan district of Beijing, Wu Xiake leaned out the window of the men’s toilet and took one last drag on his cigarette before flicking the butt into the river below. Some day, he half-expected to flick a cigarette butt into the Yongding and watch the entire river catch fire, such was the level of pollutants and chemicals in the water. He’d gone to an illegal Website one night and read a story about how the massive levels of pollution resulting from the recent Chinese economic revolution were destroying the earth’s environment at a dramatic rate, and how Chinese pesticides entering the river traveled from there to Bo Hai Bay and the Gulf of China and then the Yellow Sea and
the Pacific Ocean and ended up in the Arctic Circle and ultimately in the fatty tissues of polar bears, where they acted like artificial estrogens that were making the polar bears gay. Wu Xiake had other things to worry about, besides gay polar bears.
He cursed, then returned to his cubicle. In the next cubicle, his friend Cui Chen was working on his desktop computer, moving frame by frame through the first half of the new movie that had streamed in that afternoon over the Internet from their friends in America, an action thriller starring Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman. At least this time, whoever had sneaked the digital camera into the theater to copy the film had held the camera steady. The last film that Wu had worked on, the bootlegger had coughed loudly every few minutes. Cui’s job was to translate the first half of the new film into Mandarin for subtitles. Wu’s job was the translate the second half, but the Boss wanted it done overnight, and Wu had had very little sleep the night before. If there was another job available to him, he’d take it, but at sixty-six years of age, who would take him? He’d once been one of the top English-to-Mandarin dubbers in the business, the voice of actors ranging from Paul Newman to Curly of The Three Stooges, with the best “nyuk nyuk nyuk” that anybody had ever heard, but now with DVDs, speed was of the essence, and nobody wanted dubbers anymore. It was much faster to go with subtitles. Everything was so hurried. His knowledge of English had gotten him this job, but he felt it was only a matter of time before the Boss got rid of him.
“Did you solve the problem?” Cui asked him in Mandarin without looking up from his computer screen.
“I can’t do it. It is too idiomatic. I was thinking about it, but it makes no sense to me,” Wu admitted.
“Tell me again what the lines are,” Cui offered. “Maybe I can help.”
“Bruce Willis says to Uma Thurman, ‘You wouldn’t be the one waiting for Mr. Right, would you, because Mister Right left.’ And she says, ‘You look like Mister Wrong to me. Your mama must have done a number on you.’ And he says, “If that’s what you want, I don’t want to be right,’ and she says, ‘You know what they say about two wrongs.’ And then he says, ‘You have the right to remain silent, but I haven’t met a woman yet who I couldn’t make scream.’”
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