White: A Novel

by Christopher Whitcomb

  “They made it all the way to the mainframe firewall,” Ravi said. The soft-spoken Indian wore a sky-blue Members Only jacket and a cheap oxford shirt buttoned to the top. No tie. “This shadow suggests a very sophisticated cloaking protocol that is designed to look like one of our own audit incursions. It’s no kid from Encino.”

  Sirad ran the towel over her face.

  “To get to the firewalls, they must understand our encryption protocols,” she said. “That means it’s possible that they know our ability to tap consumer data streams.”

  “That’s right,” Mitchell said. He opened the breech of his Dremmel and looked down the pyramid-stacked barrels. “Unfortunately, there’s something else. You haven’t heard the worst.”

  NINETY-TWO . . .

  Jeremy’s arms had begun to burn with the push-ups. The pain gave him focus, but nothing could keep his mind from traveling back to that Irian Jaya jungle.

  Once GI Jane turned toward French, things had happened very quickly. The Delta sergeant stepped up behind one of the Americans, pushed the muzzle of his Mark IV up behind the man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

  BOOM! The .223 caliber rifle had echoed through the clearing.

  One of Mahar’s Indonesian buddies jumped up and ran as if his feet were afire, stumbling with his hands cuffed behind his back and the burlap bag over his head. He took four or five steps before slamming into the satellite dish and knocking himself back to the ground. One of the SEALs walked over and grabbed him by the arm, but the man struggled, pleading in a language that made no sense to Jeremy.

  One hundred five . . .

  The SEAL dragged the man back to his original position. Jeremy could see through his scope that the captive had wet himself. A dark splotch spread out through his crotch and down his pant legs.

  “Caleb?!” the American on the left called out. There was no mistaking his nationality now. Jeremy recognized the accent as Deep South, Alabama or Georgia.

  “Sit still, Frank,” the albino said. He spoke calmly, almost indignant.

  “I think these bastards are gonna ki-ll us,” Frank squealed. “You gotta do somethin’, man! They’re gonna kill us.”

  GI Jane knelt next to him and said something too quiet for Jeremy to hear. The man shook his head violently back and forth and tore at his flex cuffs.

  “Run, boys! They’re gonna kill us all!” Frank yelled. He tried to gain his feet but tripped and fell facefirst into the dirt.

  One hundred twenty . . .

  One of the Indonesians leaped up, too, but he made it just a couple of steps before tripping over one of the dead dogs and crashing back to earth.

  BOOM!

  French shot Frank where he lay on the ground. Then all hell broke loose.

  “THE WORST?” SIRAD lifted an eyebrow. “What could be worse?”

  “Our inner perimeter firewall is a quasiphysical backstop,” Ravi reminded her. “Deliberately discrete from other fail-safes. In order to get to it, the intruders must already have compromised our keystone algorithms, which means they have cloned or stolen blueprints for our number generators.”

  Sirad sat back in her chair. Algorithms—the armor that protected Quantis’s entire encryption system—were based on what in the past had always been randomly generated prime numbers, very large prime numbers of up to 155 digits. Until recently, randomness—the great limitation of encryption theory—had been “made up” by computers using stochastic variation in physical noise from sources such as office keyboards, city traffic, and wind. Despite their best attempts, however, no computer had produced true randomness. Borders Atlantic’s new “number generators” had changed that.

  “It’s possible that someone may already have tapped our data streams,” Planck suggested. “That means outside interests may understand the truth about our interactions with the Saudis. That, of course, could prove catastrophic.”

  The truth. Sirad knew that the real point in offering the world secure communications was to let Mitchell listen in. Though everyone from rival corporations to foreign governments believed their conversations and data transmissions safe, Borders Atlantic rummaged freely through their most intimate secrets like a burglar in the panty drawer.

  “How?” Sirad asked, turning to Ravi. “Quantis has been up and running, commercially, for just twelve months. Your mathematicians calculated that it would take the most powerful computers several years just to map it.”

  Jordan Mitchell answered for him.

  “Only one thing matters at this point: we’ve been compromised.”

  “Fortunately, they don’t have everything they need to get in,” Ravi added. “So far, we’ve identified four separate intrusions . . . none of them terminal. They seem to be probing the system’s parameters, kind of like stumbling around in a dark room, looking for the light switch.”

  “Who?” Sirad asked. “Is this corporate?”

  “We don’t think so,” Dieter said. “Conventional hacks target peer-to-peer networks, like the Sober.c or Bizex worms. Intrusions of this sophistication would have required equipment and science we know to exist only among governments.”

  “And few of those,” Ravi agreed. “The U.S. has it, of course, as well as the UK, China, and India.”

  Sirad nodded. She knew that U.S. intelligence agencies had shared technology with the Brits. India wrote the majority of the world’s computer software. China stole it.

  “We fully expected tests of our firewalls,” Mitchell said, “but nothing this extensive, well camouflaged, or sophisticated.”

  The room seized quiet for a moment before another man—Hamid—raised his hand as if in an elementary school classroom. As the company’s chief financial analyst, he better than anyone knew the downside of a successful compromise of the Quantis encryption system.

  “There’s something you haven’t considered,” he offered. “As of yesterday, Borders Atlantic held nearly sixty-seven percent of the world’s cell phone market. Even rumors of a successful intrusion could jeopardize market dominance and cost this company billions. We need to keep any investigation very close to the vest.”

  Sirad looked troubled, and not by the malicious look from her former lover. First the terrorist attacks on the Mall of America, Disneyland, and Atlanta, and now cyberattacks on America’s highest-profile commercial encryption technology. It had been more than three years since 9/ 11 without a single domestic incident. What was going on?

  “We need to find the people behind these intrusions, and we need to do it now,” Mitchell said. His voice sounded firm but neither accusatory nor panicked. “Sirad, this is your program, but you’ll need to coordinate closely with the seventeenth floor.”

  Sirad nodded. All security operations ran through what was known within Borders Atlantic as the Rabbit Hole. Dieter Planck’s cadre of scientists, mathematicians, and former special operations specialists rivaled most governments in terms of assets and sophistication. The fact that Planck had proven a nemesis to Sirad would complicate matters, but no more than she could handle. He struck her as a tense, incomplete man. A nuisance.

  “Yes, sir,” Sirad agreed. She caught Dieter’s threatening smile and held it.

  “I want to know the instant you have something,” Mitchell said, standing. Trask had already started toward the door, reinforcing Sirad’s belief that the officious chief of staff really could read the boss’s mind. “I want to know immediately if you get any unusual questions from our overseas contractors. And I want you to use all means necessary to end this. Do you understand? All means necessary.”

  With that, Jordan Mitchell walked out of the room.

  “Meet me in my office: twenty minutes,” Dieter said, standing to leave as well. Ravi, the systems engineer, gathered his stack of papers and shoved them into a cracked vinyl folder.

  Sirad nodded, dismissing his authoritative tone. This had been a morning full of news, nearly all of it bad. At least she had the blizzard to cheer her up.

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY . . .


  Jeremy watched through his mind’s eye as the second Indonesian starting yelling, making no particular sense through his fear and the burlap mask. He managed to run farther than the others had before taking two rifle rounds in the back. The first Indonesian tried again to escape but met a similar fate as GI Jane barked out orders to French and his assaulters.

  Seizing on the confusion, Caleb wrenched violently, shaking the burlap bag off his head before jumping to his feet. A SEAL moved to within arm’s length to stop him, but the pale-white captive kicked out with his right leg, a well-practiced martial arts move that dropped the SEAL in his tracks. Caleb quickly knelt down, picked up the rifle with his hands still cuffed behind his back, and fired a half dozen rounds.

  Jeremy just stared at first, unable to believe his eyes. It looked as if the albino had practiced this move a thousand times. He was no amateur.

  The rest of the task force dove for cover as Caleb lay down suppressive fire and ran for the jungle. By the time Jeremy could draw his crosshairs, the American had already disappeared through the vegetal wall.

  Shit! he scolded himself. This operation had been weeks in the planning, with input from at least half a dozen agencies. No one would want to report back that someone had escaped. Especially an American.

  One hundred forty-three . . .

  French and one of the SEALs ran after Caleb as Jane walked over to Mahar. She knelt directly in front of him and barked out something in the terrorist’s native tongue. By inflection, Jeremy understood it to be a question.

  Mahar said two words, obviously not what she wanted to hear. GI Jane pulled a semiautomatic handgun out from under her BDU blouse, placed the barrel right between his eyes, and Pop! shot him dead. The terrorist fell backward, folding grotesquely over his legs. A stream of blood spurted straight up out of the wound, then eased to a dribble.

  GI Jane wasted no time moving on to her next gruesome task. She reached into the right thigh pocket of her BDU trousers and produced a pair of black steel pruning sheers. While the assault team watched the jungle for any sign of Caleb, she walked from body to body, kneeling down, spreading open the fingers of each man’s right hand, and expertly clipping off their index digits.

  All fingers—excised between the second and third knuckles—went into a Ziploc freezer bag, which she tucked back into her BDUs.

  “Burn it!” GI Jane called out, motioning toward the huts. The assault force dragged the bodies to the larger of the huts and tossed the corpses inside. Each shack got a Thermit grenade, which flashed white against the new rain.

  Within seconds, the entire compound vanished into a conflagration that caught the generators, gas cans, even the aluminum satellite dish, in its grip. Jeremy heard a couple rifle shots from the jungle, and then French and the SEAL emerged emptyhanded. Jeremy watched as the task force gathered around GI Jane, then . . .

  Brrring . . . brrring . . . brrring . . .

  Jeremy stopped his push-ups as a phone interrupted the jungle flashback.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “No names,” a voice said on the other end of the line. “Do you know who this is?”

  Jeremy did. He sat on the edge of the bed breathing heavily but said nothing more.

  “We are bringing you back in,” the voice advised. “Tonight. The concierge has a ticket for you downstairs.”

  Back in? Jeremy wondered. His initial instructions called for him to fly out the next morning to Ramstein, Germany, for a debriefing, then back to his TDY duty station in Baghdad.

  “I trust you’ve seen the news?” the voice asked.

  Jeremy swallowed hard, trying to slow his heart rate and breathing. He grabbed the remote and flipped to BBC World.

  Images of broken, mangled bodies. A bomb. Devastation. The slug line said Atlanta.

  “Don’t miss your plane,” the man said. “We need you stateside as soon as possible.”

  Jeremy heard the phone go dead, then turned back to televised images of the carnage. Something had gone terribly wrong; something more than what he had just seen in the jungle. The pit in his stomach told him they had to be related.

  III

  Tuesday, 15 February

  00:55 GMT

  Reagan National Airport, Alexandria, Virginia

  NO ONE PAID any attention to the Merry Maids cleaning van that appeared out of the snow and pulled up to a high-rise luxury apartment building at 21789 Madison Road. The driver—a dark-skinned Indonesian working illegally on a student visa—parked in a handicapped space. He yanked the collar of his jacket up around his neck and walked around the back of the van. A passenger joined him at the rear doors, a white man who called himself Ralph.

  “I take da cart,” the driver said, pointing out what he wanted the other man to accomplish. He spoke only broken English and weighed little more than the brooms he pushed, but everyone at Merry Maids marveled that this man could clean toilets like a world afire. “You carry shoulder bag.”

  The passenger wrapped a scarf around his face against the cold and snow, then did as he was told.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit, out here, ain’t it,” Ralph said, less a question than small talk. He waited for the driver to retrieve his rolling workstation and followed him inside to the reception desk. A uniformed doorman sat near the back of a grand marble foyer.

  “Sign the book an’ list yo’ place o’ destination.” The doorman pointed to a loose-leaf binder where other visitors had scribbled indecipherable scratch.

  The Indonesian attempted to show his company ID, but the doorman couldn’t have cared less. He looked past his visitors to consider the snow piling up outside. He had two hours left in his shift and did not look forward to what would surely be a miserable commute.

  The passenger left the scarf around his face, clapping his hands together and shuffling his feet to regain some warmth.

  “You gonna have ta move that truck,” the doorman said. “I ain’t care, but Ms. Embry in 1411 always watching those handicapped spaces. She’ll call the po-lice and they write yo’ ass up.”

  The driver smiled and nodded. “Not worry,” he said. “Company pay ticket.”

  “Suit yissef.” The doorman shrugged. They were all like this, these cleaning people. Never cared about what he said, even if they spoke English, which they seldom did. Most of the time, they were Chinamen or Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, jabbering in their own tongues. And Russians; lots of Russians lately. Shame to see a brother stooping.

  With that, the two sanitation professionals pushed their work cart to the elevators and stepped inside the farthest to the right. The driver pressed twelve and waited as the car shot upward.

  “How about I go get started on 2110,” the passenger said when the doors opened.

  “I start twelve floor,” the Indonesian agreed. He nodded once, then held up the Nextel phone Merry Maids gave all their DC workers. “Call me when ready. I come up.”

  “Yeah,” the passenger agreed. The Indonesian pushed his cart off the elevator and disappeared down the corridor, seeking his appointed toilets.

  Once the doors closed, however, the passenger rode up eight more flights. When the doors opened, he walked out of the elevator and down the corridor to a service entrance. He opened the unlocked door and hurried up a few more steps to another door that opened out onto the massive building’s snow-covered roof.

  Within minutes, he had found himself a lee on the roof’s northwest corner. He knelt down behind the waist-high parapet.

  RRRRRRRRRRRR . . .

  An unsettling rumble grew on the northern horizon and filled the air around him with a hoarse, deafening noise. The passenger looked up and out toward Washington DC, which lay out there someplace in the waning storm. Within seconds, he saw it. Due north, looking like they might fly directly into him, came two enormous headlights, then the distinctive nose cone of a 747-400.

  Air France flight 176 from Charles de Gaulle International seemed to hang in the air as it approached, traveling more t
han 150 knots but almost stationary relative to his position in the flight path. It looked as though it might fall out of the sky with the snow.

  The Merry Maid showed no expression as the plane roared just to the right of him, off the building’s eastern shoulder. He watched until the red and green warning lights disappeared; then he reached down and unzipped the case.

  He pulled out three heavy steel rifle components: a gas-operated receiver group, a black polymer stock assembly, and a massive fluted barrel tipped with a quatro-ported muzzle break. Even to an experienced shooter, the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle was a formidable sight to behold. With a maximum effective range of 1,800 meters, a ten-round magazine, and bullets the size of pinecones, this semiautomatic doomsday device was the only low-signature, hand-portable weapon capable of penetrating the windscreen glass of a 747 airliner. Topped with a decent scope, it could accomplish irrevocable harm.

  Now all I’ve got to do is keep from freezing to death, the passenger thought. He checked his watch and hunkered down behind the rifle. Snow descended quietly around him, covering the rooftop and the sniper with more of its anonymous coating of white.

  “HAVE YOU TIMED this out?” the president asked. He led the way down a broad corridor that seemed to sag with the gravity of his presence.

  “The computer clocks it at eight minutes,” Andrea Chase answered. She read as she walked, trying desperately to keep up with the president’s exaggerated stride and the “Blue Thing”—a twice-daily summary of incoming cable traffic and key reporting. Chase still hadn’t read a second package distilled from highlights of the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefing, the State Department’s INR summary, and White House Press Office media clippings.

  “This speech is full yet succinct; firm yet compassionate,” Chase said. “That’s just what we want to project to the American public right now.”

  The former CEO of a New Haven insurance company, Chase had never handled anything more intense than hurricanes and hailstorms, but that didn’t stop her from rising to the challenge. A number cruncher by trade, she felt more than capable of making the transition from insurance claims to body counts.