by Rawlin Cash
His plan was straightforward. He attached a suppressor to the rifle and took aim at the main water line entering the site. He pulled the trigger. The clean bang of the gun rang out over the valley and a moment later, a hole the size of a football tore into the steel pipe supplying water to the cooling towers.
The dogs nearest the pipe began barking and a guard swung a spotlight in its direction.
Hunter shifted position and aimed at the main electrical transformer on the far side of the facility. A second gun shot and the transformer’s metal case was blown open. The transformer caught fire and lights across the facility flickered and dimmed. Loud engines started up as the generators kicked in. The noise agitated the dogs, who were barking and becoming increasingly restless. The generators were strong enough to keep the lights on, but the air conditioning necessary for the computer equipment was compromised.
Hunter took aim again and the third shot knocked a hole in the nearer of two rooftop water tanks.
It wouldn’t take long for the sensitive equipment to start overheating.
At that point, a call would go out automatically to a maintenance team based in Salt Lake City, about ten miles away. Protocol required that any equipment malfunction also automatically call in extra security. There would be a few minutes of distraction and lost focus as the new guards arrived and were processed by the on-site security team.
Hunter left the rifle where it was and began on foot across the mile of scrub toward the outer fence. He was dressed head to toe in black and carried a black canvas bag.
He was halfway to the western perimeter when the first helicopter flew in. It approached from the direction of Provo and landed on the south side of the facility. It carried the additional security personnel, twelve men with M16s, who would report to the security station at the front gate before being sent back out. By the time Hunter reached the fence, the second helicopter containing the maintenance crew was also landing.
Hunter paused at the fence. The dogs were out of control. The additional guards were creating a commotion at the gate. The guards watching the fence were at their posts but he knew they were distracted.
He cut an opening in the chain-link with a wire cutter, opened the canvas bag, and slid it inside the fence. Then he tied the fence back together with wire ties.
He left the bag where it was and made his way north along the fence. Two white rabbits cautiously found their way out of the bag and into the fresh, moonlit night.
When he was about a hundred yards from the northwest post, more floodlights came on, triggered by the rabbits. A moment later, the dogs from the two closest posts, already excited, came running down the strip of no man’s land toward the rabbits.
They were followed by the guards.
Hunter let them pass, then cut through the chain-link and hurried the distance to the second fence. The generators were not powerful enough to electrify the fence and Hunter touched it tentatively to make sure it was off. Then he cut it open and climbed through.
His target building was fifty yards away across open asphalt. He checked both directions and kept low before making a move. While the building contained some of the most sophisticated computing hardware on the planet, it wasn’t that different from any other corrugated steel warehouse. It could have been used to house chickens. Massive air conditioners, now without power, lined the back wall of the building. A steel staircase led to a platform for servicing them. Hunter climbed the steps, opened one of the air conditioner units, removed the fan from its housing, and let himself in through the opening.
Inside the building, hundreds of servers were lined in rows. Each had a control panel, usually with a green LED light flashing above it, but every sixth machine had a blue light. These servers regulated the other machines and hosted the filesystem.
Hunter went to the closest of these and with a small screwdriver, opened the control panel, disconnected two fiber-optic cables, put a small device on the end of each, and reattached them to the panel.
The devices would soon be discovered, and a few days later the man from Hopkinton, Massachusetts would be arrested by the FBI. That wasn’t Hunter’s problem. By then he’d have everything he needed.
He reattached the control panel casing to the server and retraced his steps out of the building, back across no man’s land, and out through the fence. He’d been inside for six minutes.
Three
Shore Valley was a private, all-girl prep school in the Woodland Drives neighborhood of downtown Tallahassee. It was bordered on one side by a country club and on the other by Myers Park. The girls who attended were from wealthy families. They wore prim, British-style uniforms and maintained impeccable instagram personas. They took lessons in horse riding, piano and ballet. They made life difficult on a few of the girls who didn’t fit in, but in general it was a nice place.
About half the girls were boarders. They were sent by their families from all over the country and lived in an old manor on the grounds of the country club. The house had once been the Florida governor’s mansion and still contained over thirty French-made chandeliers.
The stated purpose of the school was to prepare the next generation of women who would lead America. Portraits of Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders adorned the walls. Unofficially, it was an excellent finishing school for any girl hoping to snag a powerful husband. Almost all the girls came from political families. Just meeting their brothers would probably be enough to snag you a future congressman at least.
That’s what Grace Brooks told her roommate before leaving the manor for swim practice.
Grace was fifteen years old. Her father had been a congressman before his untimely death two years earlier. Her mother, Meredith Brooks, was a senator.
She had an extremely difficult relationship with her mother. Of course there were the unresolved emotions around her father’s death, and there was the fact her mother had shipped her off to boarding school immediately after the funeral, but even accounting for those factors, the relationship was unusually fraught. They were both ambitious women, they were strong-willed, stubborn. Their shrink told them they were too similar. There was more to it though. There was definitely a sharp edge to the relationship. Something you didn’t usually see in a family.
During her mother’s last election campaign, Grace started calling her the Merry Widow in campaign photo hashtags. She’d meant it as a joke but the name stuck. Even today, everyone at the capitol and all critical press coverage referred to Meredith Brooks as the Merry Widow.
Meredith spent thirty thousand dollars a semester on Grace’s tuition and another twenty thousand on board. It was a lot of money, even for them. An ordinary member of the US senate received a salary of $174,000. As President Pro Tempore, Grace’s mother got $193,900. It was a good salary, but it still meant Meredith spent a full fifty percent of her take-home pay on her daughter’s high school tuition.
Grace was the type of fifteen-year-old who knew those numbers. She could see the lengths her mother went to to get her out of her life. She thought about it constantly.
She thought about it as she walked through the country club and out onto the tree-lined avenue at Santa Rosa Drive. The street was beautiful in the afternoon sun. The houses had manicured lawns, gardeners, swimming pools. A lady coming toward her was carrying a poodle.
Grace had come that way a thousand times. It was a little more secluded than the route they were supposed to take but the school wasn’t overly strict about it. It was as safe a place as you were going to find anywhere in the country.
Grace didn’t know that the car across the street had been waiting for her. It was a maroon-colored Chevy Impala with tinted windows and the logo of the Herz rental company on a sticker on the windshield. It had been picked up from the Herz desk at Tallahassee Airport two hours earlier by a passenger who’d flown in on the American Airline red-eye from Washington.
The passenger was known to the girl at the Herz rental desk. She recogn
ized him because she saw him regularly. In fact, she saw him every two weeks like clockwork. He was Arab-looking, medium height, medium build. He looked preppy in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and slacks. He wore Rayban sunglasses and penny loafers.
He dressed like the mildest, blandest, most inoffensive guy you could imagine. He paid by credit card. He took the extra insurance. He brought the car back clean, a few hours after picking it up, always with a full tank of premium.
But none of that fooled the girl at the Herz desk. She could see it in his eyes. Her sister had married a violent man and there was something about those eyes she’d never forget. Once, her sister’s husband beat her so badly she’d miscarried a baby.
So when this man came up to the desk, the girl’s chest tightened. Her hand trembled as she prepared the rental agreement. She was sure the man didn’t notice, he never said anything and he kept coming back, but she felt it every single time.
If the police ever came by to ask about a customer, she’d have known it was him. Before they even opened their mouths, she’d know it was him, and that he’d done something very bad to some unfortunate woman.
But the police never did ask. No one did.
The man sat in the driver’s seat and watched Grace stroll down Santa Rosa. He felt like he knew her, and he did know her. He probably knew her better than anyone else in the world. He knew her routine. He knew her family connections. He knew what the messages on her phone said, what she bought when she used her debit card, what she looked at when she was on the Internet. He knew who her friends were and he knew where they were located. He knew she listened to music on her headphones when she walked, that she liked to keep busy, that she didn’t speak to strangers on the street.
He had a man at the embassy monitor her remotely every day, and every two weeks, like clockwork, he checked in on her personally.
She was oblivious. She had no idea anyone was interested in her, let alone the government of Saudi Arabia. She certainly had no idea how valuable she was to them.
The man liked to think that if she did know, she’d have enjoyed the idea of it. Little old her, right there at the center of things. She’d find it flattering, the effort they’d made to keep tabs on her.
He also liked to fantasize about killing her. She was old enough to know what was happening. He’d hurt her, he’d fill her with terror, he’d force her to maintain eye contact as he slowly strangled her with his bare hands.
But those weren’t his orders. Not yet at least.
His job was to watch. To take photos. To make sure nothing was amiss.
He took photos of her walking down the street. He waited outside the pool and took a few more after her practice when her hair was wet. He took some of her entering the manor, and some of her dorm room window.
He didn’t take especially rigorous steps to avoid being seen. The girl never noticed a thing. Neither did the school.
Killing this girl would be the easiest thing in the world.
He drove back to the airport in time for the afternoon flight to Dulles and returned the car. The bitch at the rental desk wasn’t there. She was another one he’d have enjoyed strangling. The way she looked at him with those bright, childish eyes, she was practically begging for it. She reminded him of a Japanese cartoon character. She wasn’t Asian but the big eyes, the childish haircut, the small breasts, he was getting aroused just thinking of her.
He made a call from a payphone in the departure terminal.
“Still no change,” he said.
“She hasn’t taken any precautions?”
“Nothing,” the man said. He was leaning on the side of the payphone and he glanced around the terminal, more out of habit than precaution. “Looks like she’s still fully compliant.”
“It’s getting close.”
“I know that.”
The man on the other end of the line let out a quick laugh, half rasp, half cough. It had been shaped by years of tobacco smoking. He smoked cigars, cigarettes, pipes, anything he could get his hands on.
“For a country so obsessed with security, they almost make it too easy,” he said.
The man in the terminal hung up the phone. They weren’t supposed to speak unnecessarily. The guy he’d called was an idiot. An embassy lackey. A friend of the Crown Prince. He was cocky.
He bought a coffee from a machine in the waiting area and sat, looking out the window at the plane.
Four
Hunter went south on Interstate 15 from Provo. He passed towns with names like Nephi, Scipio, Hatch, and Panguitch. He took US 89 past Dixie National Forest, Navajo Nation, and the Hopi Reservation. It was noon when he crossed the border out of Utah. He stopped near Winona, Arizona and bought gas. At Camp Verde he pulled into a diner.
It was a hot, dusty place. From his booth he could see out the window a long way down the highway. Vehicles approached like chimeras from the heat.
“Coffee?” the waitress said.
“Please. Black.”
She left him with a menu and when she returned with the coffee he ordered the chili.
He watched her work. It was pleasant. When she topped up his coffee he asked if they had a payphone. It was outside the men’s washroom and he broke a five dollar bill with her. He went to the phone and dialed a sixteen digit number. The line connected and he heard the beeps and gurgles of a modem. Everything was working.
When he got back to the booth his food was waiting. He ate methodically, shoveling the spoon like a laborer.
“Everything okay?” the waitress said.
He nodded. He was chewing. He drank some coffee and looked up at her.
“How much farther to Phoenix?”
“About an hour,” she said. “A little more.”
He nodded. He knew the answer but he wanted to talk to her. He wanted the company.
He wanted to ask how old she was, what her name was, where she was from.
“You got any ketchup?” he said.
She nodded and got it. The chili didn’t need it but he put it on.
He finished up and got back on the road. He didn’t stop again until the border. He got out and used the washroom and bought cigars, ten in the pack for two dollars apiece. They were Nicaraguan and harsh, but two dollars.
He crossed the border at Nogales with false identification and once in Mexico, bought a disposable cell phone. He checked into a motel on the south side of Nogales at about dusk.
In his room he used the cell and a hundred dollar Google laptop to access the feed from the bug at the data center.
The bug was pre-programed and the feed was unalterable. If it didn’t provide the files he needed there was no way of changing the search. He’d given it the document identifiers that he knew he wanted, or that would have corresponded to the documents he wanted if they existed, and now he could only wait and see what came down the pipe.
The room was basic, a bed, a side-table, an old television on a dresser of empty drawers. He drew the curtains and took a shower while the program performed its search.
After his shower he boiled water and made coffee with the packets of instant nescafé provided. He sat on the bed and let out a sigh. He was tired. He would have liked to sleep.
He thought about what had happened to him in Kabul. It had been over four years and the government had done things to inhibit his memory.
What he remembered, or at least thought he remembered, was that the other seven members of Preying Mantis, the other enhanced operatives, had all killed themselves or died in preventable accidents in the line of duty. He was sure he remembered each death. The news coming in. The discussions in the base. Even the funerals.
But when he tried to pin down specific details, to actually force himself to picture the memories, he couldn’t do it. It was like he was remembering the synopsis of a movie he’d read about, but hadn’t actually seen.
It made him suspicious.
Every memory was suspect.
The green files were the first to be downl
oaded. He’d read those before. They gave the official line and corresponded exactly to what he thought he remembered. The suicides, the accidents, the helicopter crash.
They were all so tidy.
No witnesses, no imagery, just brief reports written anonymously and entered into the NSA’s database by someone in a typing pool.
He reread the files and confirmed they were what he’d already seen.
The cursor was now searching for the next level to the story, the red files. He waited about thirty minutes and when he got drowsy he turned on the television. He watched the news in english and was flicking through stations at random when the download completed.
It was as he’d expected. The red files had been deleted. Every one of them came back empty. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing them not just from the CIA’s internal system, but from the permanent system maintained by the NSA. The government’s secret version of reality, its record of everything, even things that weren’t supposed to exist, had no record of the files he was looking for.
But he knew they’d existed once. The fact there were green files implied there had been red files. Greens files were prepared for every incident that took pace inside the Mantis program. They were written by reference to the red files, the accurate files, and if there was no need to lie, both sets were identical. But both sets always existed. Red for internal use. Green for distribution. If one existed without the other, someone had deleted something. It was a simple system but whoever had removed the files he was looking for had made a mistake.
He looked at the cursor. It had moved on to the next items in the search. He didn’t hold out much hope.
He left the computer on but closed his eyes and was asleep in seconds. He had the same troubled dreams as always. When he woke a few hours later it was the middle of the night and the cursor had come up with more matches.