The Polaris Protocol

by Brad Taylor

  55

  The trunk of the car jerked open, and Booth squinted his eyes at the glare coming from the sun. When he could focus, he saw the crazy bald man standing above him, wearing a wig and holding a knife. He began to panic and the man said, “Stop. I’m cutting your bonds. It’s time to show the people that your protocol works.”

  He relaxed, letting the man cut through the tape around his ankles and wrists. After it was complete, he was jerked out of the trunk. The man put his weird eyes on him and said, “Do exactly as I say, and you will live another day. Try to run, and I will make your death infinitely slow. There is nowhere I won’t find you. Understand?”

  Booth nodded, afraid to speak.

  “Bring your computer and whatever else you need. You are going to show a man how your system works.”

  He gathered his things, including the two GPS devices, and followed behind his captor. He knew his last test would have caused a massive reaction at Schriever Air Force Base and was worried about doing another such test. He’d end up causing another blackout in the Northern Hemisphere, and that might potentially create an all-out push to find his protocol. It would still take some time, but he didn’t like the odds of discovery, especially since he was sure he would have to do it a third time, if only to instruct whoever was purchasing the protocol.

  By the time they had left the walking promenade of Motolinía, he had the beginnings of an idea. His GPS would lock on to four different satellites to obtain a location, showing the man it functioned. All he needed to do at that point was demonstrate a discrepancy. What if he affected only the specific satellites the GPS was using? Then he wouldn’t harm the entire constellation. It would cause some disruption, as undoubtedly someone else was also using those four satellites, but there were thirty-five in the air, and other devices could switch seamlessly to another satellite. It wouldn’t cause a wholesale blackout. In fact, if he attacked only two of the four, he’d still get a shift in signal. The 2nd SOPS would see it, but it would be looked at as a signal anomaly instead of a catastrophe.

  He spent the rest of the walk working out the specifics in his mind, figuring out how to attack only two satellites. He hadn’t designed the protocol that way, but he could use the data from the GPS to isolate them.

  Still running the mechanics through his head, he didn’t notice his captor had stopped and bumped into his back. The man scowled, then opened the door to a restaurant called La Opera, waving him through. The room was covered in burnished wood that had the look of age, the ceiling ornately sculpted and the bar to the right fairly crowded with businesspeople. He was led to a table in the middle and presented to another man who could have been Mexican. Booth heard the name Farooq, and when the man spoke, Booth realized he was not from Mexico. Realized his POLARIS protocol was about to be turned over to America’s enemies.

  The thought did not alter his calculations one bit, as his sole concern was survival. It was like passing a billboard right before slamming on the brakes to avoid an accident, something that registered and then was immediately forgotten.

  He gave up the deception of using “Guy Fawkes” and stated his real name.

  “A pleasure, Mr. Booth. Pelón here says that you can cause American drones to stop flying. I’d like to see that.”

  Booth looked from his captor to Farooq, slightly confused. He said, “Yes, the POLARIS protocol will do that, but it’s not designed to affect drones. It affects the GPS constellation, which is what the drones use to operate. You know about GPS?”

  Farooq said he did, and Booth gave a quick class on POLARIS, describing how it functioned. Farooq said, “So this works with all GPS devices? Bombs, ships, cruise missiles?”

  “Yes. If it uses a GPS, it will become ineffective.”

  Booth saw the gleam in Farooq’s eyes and knew he was doing something very, very wrong. But it was too late to worry about the repercussions. Way too late to wonder about making any money. Not if he wanted to continue living with the soles of his feet attached.

  Farooq said, “Show me.”

  “We need to be near a window. Can we change tables?”

  They called a waiter and moved deeper into the restaurant, getting a high-backed wooden booth next to a window. The waiter pointed at the ceiling above them, where a hole was circled in paint. He said, “That’s Pancho Villa’s bullet hole. He ate here and shot the ceiling.”

  Booth found the comment surreal. Twenty minutes ago he had been taped up in the trunk of a car, put there by a man he was convinced was insane. Now he was about to show another man who was undoubtedly a terrorist how to thwart one of the United States’ greatest technological advantages. And he was getting tourist tidbits from the waitstaff. The situation caused a nervous giggle to escape. The snigger died instantly when Pelón looked at him.

  He set up his two GPSs in the windowsill, then showed Farooq the interface he had designed while they locked on.

  Farooq said, “You must have Wi-Fi for this to work?”

  “Yes. Well, you need to have Wi-Fi to load the settings.” He pointed toward a dial on a screen. “You can use this to delay the action. In other words, if I turned this dial, when I hit ‘send,’ the operation wouldn’t happen until the time I had set.”

  Farooq nodded, and Booth said, “One thing about the time I forgot to mention. Not the time delay I was talking about, but the actual time of disruption. You need to be sure you set it to exactly what you want, because once it begins, you can’t turn it off. POLARIS is synced with the constellation itself, and the disruption also affects the program.”

  Farooq said, “You will give me this computer? Is that what will happen?”

  Booth said, “No, no. You need to bring another computer. This one is mine and has biometric safety features that only I can operate. It’s also got about four hundred different security tripwires. You try to mess with the program on this system, and you’ll end up formatting the hard drive, wiping out all traces of the protocol. I’ll have to transfer a clean copy of POLARIS to your own system.”

  Booth heard the GPS chirp and quit talking. He tapped a few keys, received the almanac information, then the specific information of the satellites the GPS was tracking. He locked two of them into the interface, dialed up the timing offset, and said, “Watch the GPS on the right. The one with the car. See where the car is located?”

  “Yes. Where we are now.”

  “Watch what happens when I hit ‘send.’”

  * * *

  Captain Lisa Donnovan was the first to see the anomaly. As the Payload System Operator on duty in the control segment at Schriever, she was responsible for monitoring every signal in the entire GPS constellation. And she could not believe her bad luck.

  Here we go again.

  She had had the misfortune to be on duty for what was now being called the “blackout” the day before, and to say it had caused some consternation was an understatement. The echo went all the way to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with her trying to identify the problem while simultaneously answering questions thrown at her by a multitude of people.

  She immediately notified the Mission Commander, who ordered a status from the other system operators on the floor. Like last time, the network and mechanical functioning of the satellites were fine. It was just the signal. Unlike last time, it was only two satellites.

  She waited for the other satellites to start going crazy and relaxed when they didn’t. Her squadron commander appeared above her shoulder, firing questions. He didn’t remain long, and she knew why: He now had to report to higher, and she was glad it wasn’t her job.

  The Mission Commander had the Satellite Vehicle Operator pull the two offending satellites and ordered them to try to replicate the event.

  Everyone began working the issue, but like last time, they got nowhere. She felt like Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation trying to get the lights on his house to
work but unable to find the magic switch.

  The damn things just decided to put out a bad signal.

  56

  The light above the conference-room door began flashing, a red and white signal meaning someone uncleared needed to enter. Kurt Hale blacked his PowerPoint screen and quit talking.

  An aide who looked to be about twelve came in, apologized, and ran over to the secretary of state, Jonathan Billings. After muttering a few words, he left again.

  Billings said, “Sorry about that. Unfortunately, I have more going on than just this issue. Continue.”

  Kurt turned on the Proxima projector. “As I was saying, the transfer was a success, and the Ghost is en route to Mexico City with Knuckles. Pike and the rest of the team are following in the Gulfstream. We’ve completed the initial interrogation of Hussein and have the instructions the Ghost is to follow once he gets there.”

  “And you’re sure he’s not going to disappear?”

  “Not if he wants to keep his feet.”

  The secretary of defense said, “Billings, quit worrying about it. He’s only going to be on the ground for a couple of hours. Once he’s met them, we take them out.” He looked at Kurt. “Right?”

  “Well, close,” Kurt said. “That was the original plan, but the instructions tell him to meet the Hezbollah guys first, then they’ll have a follow-on meeting with the American who has the hack. They want to ensure he’s who he says he is and that he’s got the money. They gave him some double-oh-seven instructions, full of tradecraft.”

  The D/CIA said, “How long will that take?”

  Kurt understood exactly where the question was directed. “We’ll still be within the window for Operation Gimlet. Shouldn’t be more than a day.”

  Billings said, “Why would they do that? You’d think they would want to get the hack as fast as possible.”

  “Because Hezbollah’s paranoid. I don’t know, maybe they’re worried that we’ll try to trick them with a plant.”

  After the chuckling died down, Alexander Palmer said, “Okay, so we’re still tracking for Gimlet. What about exposure of the Taskforce? What’s the story on the YouTube video? Anything more?”

  “We’re still getting probed, but we can’t pin it down. The real concern is that we’re getting probes on other cover organizations, including the Taskforce headquarters under Blaisdell Consulting. They’re making linkages somehow. Might just be guesswork, but with enough of that we could be in trouble. All they have to do is throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.”

  The D/CIA said, “Great. This will be the Church Committee all over again. The press is going to explode with joy. And you know who’s going to get the brunt of this? Me. That’s who. It’s always the CIA that gets hauled in front of Congress.”

  Kurt said, “We might have one lead. My guys have gone back and we did find an anomaly from right before all this started. We had some exploration into Grolier Recovery Services from an ISP in Colorado Springs. We don’t know the specific location, but it’s definitely Colorado Springs.”

  The Sec Def said, “Not really. The flavor of the day is the NSA. My people.”

  The D/CIA said, “And you think this is connected to the group Anonymous?”

  “Better than that: I think it’s connected to this GPS issue. It’s way too much coincidence. I think we find the guy with the hack, and we find the YouTube people.”

  “I don’t know about that. Seems like a stretch.”

  Kurt said, “Schriever Air Force Base is in Colorado Springs. These probes began right before the first disruption. I don’t think it’s a stretch.”

  “Say you’re right. How will you find them even if you capture the guy? I mean, they don’t call themselves ‘Anonymous’ for nothing. Your hackers can’t locate them through the digital trail, but you think this guy will be able to? He probably doesn’t even know their real names.”

  “They had to talk somehow. We can’t find them through a digital trail going back from Grolier, but if we move forward from him, I bet it’s a different story.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we take them down.”

  Palmer said, “Huh? Here? In America?”

  Kurt said, “Hell yes, here in America. Those little fucks are about to expose our most closely guarded secrets. They want to play with fire, I say let ’em get burned.”

  The principals said nothing, looking back and forth to see if anyone agreed with the extreme measures before stepping into the water themselves. Finally, Billings said, “You know, Anonymous threatened Los Zetas a while back, and Los Zetas made an attempt to find them. When they said they were going to kill ten men for every person Anonymous exposed, the hackers backed off.”

  Kurt said, “Yeah, what’s your point?”

  “You’re basically saying you want to act like a drug cartel.”

  “What the hell? You guys were the ones that didn’t seem concerned with any of that before. All you cared about was Operation Gimlet. What was it you said? ‘Better stop that YouTube video from getting out’? How did you think that was going to happen?”

  Palmer held up his hands. “Hey, we aren’t going to solve that question with the principals. That’s definitely one for the entire Oversight Council. The president needs to be involved.”

  “Well, you’d better involve him soon because we’re running out of time. We catch that guy with the GPS hack and you can execute Operation Gimlet as planned, but we’re going to need to squeeze him immediately to protect Project Prometheus. I can’t wait until after we capture him to begin debate. We’re—”

  The light flashed above the door again, and Kurt cursed, exasperated. A man entered, looked around the room, then ran to the secretary of defense.

  After he left, the SECDEF said, “That was from the Air Force chief of staff. There’s been another outage. Another test, but this time only two satellites were affected, which means he can pick and choose what he attacks. I hope it wasn’t a proof of concept for Hezbollah and they now have the hack.”

  The comment brought a low murmur, with Kurt hearing the term Gimlet three different times. He attempted to calm them down.

  “They can’t. They’re waiting on the money guy. They’re waiting on the Ghost.”

  The D/CIA said, “I cannot believe the fate of our national grid and defense architecture rests in the hands of a Palestinian terrorist who’s sworn to kill us. I cannot believe I agreed to this.”

  Kurt smiled. “Look at the bright side: This goes bad and the press finds out, nobody’s going to care what Anonymous does.”

  57

  Using the original reservation from the captured man and his new passport, the Ghost checked into his small boutique hotel without issue. In line two people behind him stood Mr. Black. Outside of the initial instructions in the bathroom, he’d said not a word to the Ghost the entire flight, never even acknowledging that they had met. That fact gave him some confidence that the Americans wouldn’t do something stupid and inadvertently get him burned. He had enough to worry about trying to pass himself off as member of al-Qaeda without the Americans causing trouble. On top of that, he had to start working on a means of escape.

  As instructed, he went to his room, opened up a prearranged Yahoo e-mail account, and sent an instant message. He waited for five minutes, then received his response from Mr. Black. An e-mail would be coming shortly.

  He puttered around the room, unpacking his things and cataloging what he would need to do to evade the clever little net they had created for him. First, of course, he’d have to find a way to remove the two ankle charges he was wearing. It wouldn’t be easy, because they were banded to his legs with metal that utilized a laser-cut key. Not impossible, though. He’d more than likely lose a little skin in the process, but he was sure they could be cut. The problem was the time needed to do so. The Americans would know everywhe
re he went, along with any instructions he had been given, so somehow he would need to introduce a delay. A meeting of some sort where only he would be present. Well, him and someone with a hacksaw who wouldn’t ask questions when provided enough cash. He just had to make sure the meeting was somewhere near the one in his instructions. He had no idea what boundary that devil Mr. Pink had set and didn’t want to find out the hard way. All Pink had said was if he felt a vibration, he had three minutes to get back on the inside.

  He’d toyed with the idea of telling the men from Hezbollah what was happening and securing their help—becoming a double agent, as it were—but ultimately discarded the idea. They were planning on killing the original man who came, and he was fairly sure they’d do the same to him the minute he showed them he was being tracked.

  The second problem was securing a passport. Even if he managed to get out of his electronic bonds, the name on the passport he was using was poison. He wouldn’t get very far having it as an identity. On this point, he was fairly sure he could leverage Hezbollah.

  The final problem was money, and he had already fixed that to a certain extent. He had the captured man’s credit cards, which still worked, as proven at check-in. The e-mail coming would have the bank account information for purchasing the nuclear secrets, and he had no intention of giving all of that to Hezbollah or whoever else was involved. Some of it would be his nest egg for a future life.

  He heard the laptop ping with an e-mail and felt a rush, just like he had in the past before going operational. He read the enclosed instructions, seeing he had a little walk in front of him, along with some link-up instructions. Hezbollah didn’t have his flight itinerary and apparently wanted to make sure they met the right guy.