Ling held his arm out to Mittie Kate, and though deceptively fit for her age, she played up the fragile female card and took her time getting down the stairs to the first floor, as if afraid of a fall. One of the black-clad soldiers waved down a cab. While he told the driver which hotel they were staying in, the other stern-faced soldier opened the door for Mittie Kate.
Forcing herself not to react to how the military knew which hotel they were in, Mittie Kate leaned on Ling as if tired from the exertion as the soldier slammed the door behind them and hit the roof twice with his fist. Neither spoke, but as the cab pulled away from the curb, Ling turned to adjust her cap and scarf and surreptitiously scanned the road behind them.
A slight nod of his head confirmed her fears.
They were being followed.
With Nikoli dead and his bio-monitor still registering vital signs, there was a better than even chance the agents in Korea and China had met the same fate. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Someone was targeting her agents, but who? There were only three people who knew about their operations outside of her own inner circle: The President, the Secretary of State, and the Director of Foreign Affairs.
She found Ling’s arm with her hand and squeezed. Whether he read the fear in her eyes or nursed his own, he pulled out his tablet and dialed Max. It rang twice before going to voicemail.
She closed her eyes and tried to relax against the headrest. Max was a big boy. Since the fiasco in Mexico, he’d grown hard. Cold. She had to trust that he could take care of himself. With her agents compromised, she had to assume she and Ling were also targets. Being tailed by the Russians seemed to support that.
Fear would get them killed. She couldn’t afford that, not even for Max. But anger… she had that in spades and would nurse it, feed it. If they made it out of Russia, she would get her hands on whoever had betrayed them and they would pay dearly.
5
“For homework,” Ryan smiled as the class groaned in unison while he placed stacks of packets on the four lab tables. “A quiz on the syllabus and a quiz on the safety rules that govern the lab and equipment. Compare and contrast the landform satellite images from 2010 and 2040. I want to know what’s changed and why.”
Motion in the doorway caught his eye and he looked up to find a wire-thin man with Coke-bottle glasses and unruly hair waving to him. Cedric always looked as if he had been sucking on a lemon, but the pinched look was worse this afternoon.
Ryan headed toward the door, speaking to the class as he went. “You have not been provided a key. I want you to figure it out on your own. And fair warning, if you give me Google answers, I will know and you’ll get a zero. You have ten minutes left of class; use it wisely.”
Cedric didn’t give him a chance to ask questions before pulling him into the lab’s prep area and closing the door. “If this is your idea of a joke, color me amused. If it’s not, we have a big problem.”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan asked, but he was afraid he already knew.
“You said those data packs were from the International Space Station?”
“Yes,” Ryan answered, then caught himself. “You got into it?”
“I had my graduate research student work on it. Ryan, that packet may have originated on the ISS, but it went through the Pentagon first. It wasn’t corrupted. It was intentionally coded, and then recoded. Some serious skill went into that packet. The true layer was covered up with some high tech manipulation, then that was hidden under a set of coding to make it look corrupt.”
“You’re saying it was photo-shopped?”
Cedric laughed, “My friend, I’ve seen some amazing things photo-shopped. This makes them look like child’s play.”
The reality of what Cedric was saying began to sink in and Ryan had to lean against the counter. “The Pentagon?”
“Adam pulled the computer off of the Global Network as soon as he saw the codes. He’s got a dummy system routing information out, so if anyone’s watching his computer they’ll think it’s still online and all is right with the world.”
“He can do that?”
“Ryan.” Cedric looked over the top of his classes as if he were addressing a child. “He’s a graduate research student for a reason.”
“Sorry, Ced. I’m not a techie. I didn’t realize you could get off the GN.”
Cedric sighed and leaned against the counter next to Ryan. “You not supposed to be able to. We did it by accident once and the shop was shut down by Big Brother for a full semester.”
“That sabbatical you took two years ago?”
“Sabbatical.” There was no mirth in his laughter. “I was in Washington defending myself. I came pretty damned close to not being allowed to teach again and Adam was nearly kicked out of school.”
“Jesus, Cedric. If I had known, I never would have pulled you into this.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t do since my little tête à tête with the CIA. I don’t like being under anyone’s thumb and I sure as hell don’t like being intimidated. Why do you think we have a dummy computer?”
“Remind me to never underestimate you guys again. Wait, you said data packets earlier, plural. What’s that about?”
“As soon as you get done here, you need to come up to the shop. Just you. No one else needs to know about this.”
“Alright,” Ryan agreed, more confused than ever.
“I mean it, Ryan. Spill one word and I’ll make your PhD look like it came from a Cracker Jack box and you can kiss your credit and bank accounts goodbye.”
Ryan laughed and held out his hand. “I don’t doubt it, my friend. And I promise, this is between the three of us, no one else needs to know. Not even Evie.”
“Good.” Cedric shook on it and disappeared through the doorway, leaving Ryan to wonder what he had gotten them into.
Despite what he had said to Cedric, he was tempted to call Marcus. If Cedric was right, he would just be putting Marcus in harms way. Back in the main lab, he stood in the doorway watching Eve. Two of his top second-year students had taken the table with her and they were pouring over the satellite images.
Between Eve, Sharon and Steven, they would have the assignment pretty well nailed down before they left the room. He’d be lucky if any of the others would even have a start on it by the time they came back to lab in two days.
Eve looked so young, so vulnerable next to the older students. What would happen to her if the CIA came knocking on the door? He thought about pulling the plug, getting the data packet back from Cedric and scrapping the whole thing. If he did that – if Mel was right and he buried his head in the sand – what would happen to Eve then?
At 3:00PM on the nose, all sixteen students rose as one to file out of the lab. Eve was the last to leave with Sharon and Steven tailing close behind her. She smiled and said, “I have Toxicology next, then I’ll be free for dinner if you’re buying.”
“If you don’t feel up to a new class and new students just yet, why don’t we scrap it and call it an early day. I’ll spring for Hunan Palace.”
“Thanks, Dad. But I want to go.” She blushed.
Steven stepped forward, “It’s okay, Doc Ryan. We have Tox, too. We’ve got Eve covered.”
“All right then. You guys have fun.” He smiled and patted Eve on the head as she passed, but part of him wished she’d taken him up on the offer.
Not so much for her own comfort, but because the idea of facing what Cedric had to show him made Ryan break out in a cold sweat. Once he went upstairs and looked, he wouldn’t be able to un-look. He’d be part of their illegal inner circle, their conspiracy group.
With everything stashed and ready for his next class, he had nothing else to procrastinate with. He had given Cedric the packet, he’d started this mess. He might as well see it through.
Locking the door to the lab behind him, he took the stairs slowly, one at a time, feeling like a man headed for the gallows. A sign on Cedric’s tech s
tudio read ‘Analysis In Progress, Do Not Disturb’. Ryan almost used it as an excuse not to knock. He hesitated and then knocked anyway. For Eve, he had to know what was going on.
As if waiting for him, Cedric opened the door as soon as Ryan’s knuckles caressed the wood, and ushered him into the dark interior. Adam, a young man Ryan had seen around campus on a number of occasions, sat at a computer console that looked like it came right out of an old Star Trek movie set. Several colorful screens were filled with a whir of electronic data, nothing Ryan recognized.
Something vaguely resembling a digital keyboard took up the center section of the tabletop but Ryan could not have told anyone what half of the keys were for. Instead of one row of F-keys, there were four. Although on closer inspection, each row was labeled with a different letter of the alphabet.
Cedric pulled up a chair for Ryan before sitting down next to him, “Okay, Adam. Show him what you’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.” After a few taps on the screen, one of the monitors changed to display a screen full of programming code. “This is the first packet. I haven’t deciphered it yet, but I’m working on it. It’s about as high-end as you get, so it’ll take a little time.
He tapped some more keys and another screen flashed over. This time, Ryan knew what he was looking at. A satellite image of the globe, color coded according to temperature and CO2 concentrations.
It was fairly similar to the ones he’d been seeing over the past ten years. Atmospheric temps and carbon sinks had not dropped much since the last one, but that was to be expected. The planet was stabilizing. “That’s what we were looking for. Not much has changed.”
“Well, why would it change?” Adam asked. “It’s fake.”
Ryan could only stare at the kid, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as it went dry. “Excuse me?”
Adam hit a few more keys and the screen turned black, before lines of white code went streaming down the screen. He hit another button and paused the flow. “Everything digital is code. Everything. The pictures of your family vacations, recipes you find online, even your online dating service. It’s just bits of data translated into something the human eye and brain can comprehend. You see these?” He pointed to a bunch of numbers and symbols across the screen. That same type of grouping could be found everywhere Ryan looked and none of it made sense. “These are intrusion codes, manually entered by someone to create the translated image.”
“Now look at this image,” he said and pulled up a third screen full of code. No intrusion markers. “This is natural computer code, the organization of bytes from an external source such as a camera, relaying information. In this case, it’s a satellite image.”
Cedric leaned forward. “Show him.”
The kid looked at Cedric for a long moment before sighing and working the keys. The image on the screen changed and Ryan felt sick. “This can’t be right.”
“It’s the actual image taken from the ISS,” Cedric spoke quietly. Neither he nor the kid were environmental scientists, but they didn’t have to be. What the image showed was obvious. A monkey could have read it.
The entire globe had a pink tinge to it. CO2 hotspots were a more vibrant red, with the United Arab Emirates being the worst. China, North Korea, and Russia were not far behind. “How have we not seen this?” Ryan breathed and sat back in his chair. “How has no one seen this?”
“While Adam has been working on breaking the code,” Cedric said, eyeing Ryan as if afraid he would bolt. “I’ve been doing a little research of my own. We have twenty-two air quality monitoring stations situated around the globe. Every one of them is either directly controlled or funded by the GN.”
“The Global Network is just a thing, a—” Ryan floundered, looking for the right word, “—a, well, it’s intangible, like the internet. It’s out there. No one person or group controls it.”
“The GN is the internet now.” Cedric sighed. “Everything runs through their network and their satellites dominate the sky. It’s some kind of clearing house, or consortium. Nothing digital passes from one device to another without going through the GN. Nothing.”
Adam turned and joined in. “Up until 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce shared oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based group. That contract was actually set to expire four years before that, but the infrastructure wasn’t in place. It wasn’t until the GN began that the U.S. finally let go. They have a headquarters in every industrialized country and everything is routed through them. They are actual flesh and blood people. Everyday Jakes like you just don’t realize it.”
“What people? Who?” Ryan asked.
“I hate to admit it, Ryan,” Cedric answered. “But we have no idea. Their identities are so well hidden, we can’t even scratch the surface.”
“Now it’s your turn,” Adam told Ryan, jamming his thumb towards the satellite image. “What does this mean?”
“It means the Earth isn’t stabilizing. Climate change was never under control and is only going to get worse.”
“I’m sorry,” Cedric shook his head. “I don’t buy into that crap, Ryan. If Global Warming is happening, why do I have to dig my way out of my house every winter? They’ve closed the city down at least once a year for the past eighteen.”
Ryan rubbed his face with his hands; this was an old argument. Though there wasn’t much room for it in these warrens of technology, Ryan stood up to pace. “They quit calling it Global Warming for just that reason, Cedric. Yes, the atmosphere is warming and yes, it is global, but what it really comes down to is stronger, fiercer weather events. Much more frequent and more intense.
“In Africa, they’ve had to adapt to growing more cool weather tolerant crops while the Philippines have been nearly wiped out due to flooding and hurricanes. We’ve lost several islands because of rising sea levels, but we’ve lost far more to being inundated with flooding during severe weather. The number and intensity of tornados in the Midwest have risen steadily over the past fifty years, and the geographical range called Tornado Alley has grown, too.
“The West and South West are in the twenty-fifth year of record breaking droughts. Most of the population of those states has relocated further north and east. Lakes situated on the Colorado River have dried up. The only time water runs in the old river bed is during spring runoff, from seasonal snow melt and thunderstorms in the higher elevations, but they can no longer depend on it.
“These are all things you’ve seen for yourself, Cedric. You know we live in a different climate than we did fifty or one hundred years ago. But we believed we were making progress. The glacial melt-off cooled the oceans and bought us some time. Time we’ve used to bring CO2 emissions to nearly pre-industrialization levels. This,” he pointed to the screen, “this says it’s all been a lie. No wonder the storms and droughts have been getting worse instead of better.”
Ryan finished his rant and sat back down, exhausted. “How in the hell have they been able to hide this for so long?”
“What can we do?” Cedric asked.
“Do? Cedric, we thought we’d done everything we could possibly do. And with the science community getting the wrong information, they’ve stopped working on it. All the forecast models are wrong. No one is even looking in the right direction anymore.”
Staring at the computer screens, trying to get their brains to process this new information, no one spoke. Whirring and clicking gadgets filled the shocked silence until Adam cleared his throat. “Well, why don’t we?”
“Why don’t we what?” Cedric asked.
Adam turned to Ryan. “Why don’t we create a new forecast model? Get the real information out there, so people will start looking again?”
Ryan shook his head. “As much as you look like the evil villain in your tech-lair, you have no idea how much programming that will take. Besides, with all this false data being fed to everyone, we’d be the laughing stocks of the modern age. The kooks trying to pass off the
healing properties of pigmy marmoset urine would get more credit than us.”
“Programming is what we do best,” Cedric said, puffing out his chest like the king rooster of the henhouse.
Adam grinned up at him and added, “I could flood the networks anonymously. Make it impossible for even the GN to trace it back to us. At the very least, it will get the scientific community to sit up and pay attention.”
“I love the way you think, kid.” Ryan put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. It was a great idea, but it took decades to build a good forecasting system for climate change. He didn’t think they had that kind of time. “No offense to your mad skills, but I think we’d get more wrong than right. There are too many intertwining variables.
“Particulate matter in the air, for instance. It’s increasing exponentially because of the droughts. Depending on whether it’s in the stratosphere or the troposphere, it acts differently when it comes to heating or cooling the atmosphere. It also has a huge impact on rainfall. It traps water molecules and doesn’t let them fall. When they do, it’s a torrential downpour.”
Both of the techies looked crestfallen as they thought about the data that would have to go into building a model. It seemed an impossible task, even to them. A slow grin spread across Adam’s face. “When is the last time you knew the system to be accurate?”
Ryan sat back down, driven down by the weight on his shoulders that just seemed to grow heavier the more they talked about the duplicity on the screens. It was a good question. How long had they been lying to the world?
“I don’t know,” he answered, rubbing his eyebrows. It was a nervous habit he thought he’d broken a long time ago. “The data pointed to serious problems in the future right up until 2018 or so. After that, there were only slight improvements until mid-2020. After that, the data started really turning around.”
Adam leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Jeesh, that’s a lot of data to rummage through.”
“What are you thinking?” Cedric asked.
“I’m thinking we could go back to the last few good years of data, then start searching for the intrusion code. That should give us a starting point and maybe help us figure out who’s behind this. But we could also strip out the intrusion code on annual data, find the last good forecast model and use that to enter the new, clean data.”
Genesis (Extinction Book 1) Page 9