Gauntlet (2 page)

Hamilton Turbee was one of those fortunate enough to be working with these elite systems at TTIC. He had been personally invited by the Senate subcommittee in charge of TTIC to join. “Turbee” didn’t need the money. He didn’t need the job. He was by nature resistive of authority, and didn’t fit into an orderly bureaucracy. He was also affected with a social disorder, though he had medication to control it. He had known from the start that the atmosphere wouldn’t be easy for him. But the thought of playing with the most powerful computer on the planet was too seductive for him to pass up. When invited, he agreed to become one of the first employees of the new agency. He was distressed when he discovered, several months later, that the NSA actually had more computing horsepower than TTIC.

Daniel Alexander, the TTIC director, had immediately regretted the decision made by the subcommittee to employ Turbee. A number of Dan’s closest advisors had told him that the new employee would be an excellent addition to the exclusive TTIC employee list. The youth possessed great skill in mathematics, and particularly in the development of complex search algorithms. But once inside the department, Turbee had fared poorly. Most of his coworkers were analysts from the Intelligence Community, or leading academics, or both. Most were workaholics. Most fit naturally into the TTIC culture. They were fastidious in habit and buttoned down in dress and attitude. Turbee shared none of these characteristics. He was 5′6″ and only 26 years old. He had never worked for the CIA, FBI, or any branch of the Armed Forces. He slouched. He dressed poorly. He came and went as he pleased and was as pale as a ghost. These eccentricities, along with a number of others, placed him immediately on Dan’s blacklist, though the youth didn’t realize it. Turbee knew nothing about reading nuances and tonality of voice, and did not understand what people thought of him. Dan, on the other hand, knew everything about these things. It was second nature to him.

Daniel Jonathon Alexander, IV was born April 4, 1952 to a high-class family in Hartford, Connecticut, a child of war and fortune. Rumor had it that the family was worth several billion dollars, although the exact sum was a closely guarded family secret. Dan’s various ancestors had fought in the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and in the first Gulf War. The family had distinguished itself not only on the battlefield, and in the worlds of commerce and industry, but also in service to country in high-level administrative positions. Various members had served as Under Secretary of State, Deputy Director of the CIA, and, for a brief period, Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Honesty, forthrightness, hard work, and intelligence characterized the various chieftains of the Connecticut Alexanders. Unfortunately, none of these qualities had been passed down to Daniel IV.

This particular Alexander simply gloried in the family wealth; he’d spent more than $20 million on a mansion on 600 acres in Connecticut, and a further $5 million on a condo in Washington, DC. He had an undergraduate degree in history from Yale, and a law degree from that same institution. But while most students worked diligently and, in the case of law school, extremely diligently, Dan had never exhibited the ability to work hard. He threw money around liberally, having other students do his term papers and take notes for him in class. He spent many of his school hours on the golf course and in the bars, either practicing his chip shot or bedding women.

He did enjoy the sense of connection and power brought by his name. The family pull had gained him an invitation to join the Skull and Bones Society, and he instinctively knew which additional strings to pull in order to gain entry into the halls of power. He’d thought briefly about joining the military in family tradition, but abandoned that idea when he realized the amount of work involved, and that route’s attenuated opportunities for shortcuts.

Instead, he developed his high-level associations by using his wealth to gain entry to the Republican Party’s inner circle. It was rumored that he had given more than $10 million to Republican presidential campaigns, through various funding vehicles. As a direct result of these connections, he held a number of high-ranking posts within the Intelligence Community. He hadn’t come by them honestly, but he knew how to use them to his benefit. And what he lacked in candor was more than made up for by his shrewdness and ruthless craft. He had developed the habit, early in his career, of “building files” on perceived adversaries. Individuals standing between him and a particular objective would soon be mired in scandal, usually involving some youthful indiscretion or sexual misadventure. Dan took steps to ensure that the same fate did not befall his own reputation; he had a PR firm on full-time retainer, building his resume and polishing his image. And there was no arguing that he looked the part—his handsome aristocratic features seemed to portray infinite strength and intelligence. To those who didn’t know him.

Dan was a gifted speaker, and quick with a witty retort. He did well speaking on TV news shows like CNBC and MSNBC. He had coauthored a book on terrorist threats inside American borders (the truth was that he paid the author $1 million to be noted as coauthor). These activities were all well represented on his resume. His staff of PR people had spent years weaving an image of Daniel Alexander IV, dean of homeland security issues, expert on terrorism. Underneath it all, however, his character had not changed. He was lazy, arrogant, ruthless, and not overly bright.

Like so many modern playmakers, Dan eventually found that wealth, pleasure, and luxuries were not enough for him. Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac, and once he had tasted it, in his undergraduate years at Yale, he became obsessed with its pull. He had obvious designs on the presidency, and was looking for a post that would vault him to national prominence.

Hamilton Turbee, on the other hand, was a (comparatively speaking) simple mathematician and programmer. He and Dan were destined for conflict from the start. He had no Intelligence background, didn’t have secret wishes to climb to high governmental positions, and was clueless about the internal workings of the CIA (most people thought this was a positive attribute). He was totally lacking in social graces and skills. He had been categorized by the pediatric psychiatrists at Georgetown University Hospital many years earlier as a “highly functioning autistic.” He was born with repetitive motion problems in his right arm, couldn’t tolerate loud or obtrusive noises, and hated being “outside.” He avoided all eye contact, needed a maid to keep him and his small apartment clean, and was able to make himself tolerable to others only through a rich cocktail of antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and stimulants. Without the medicinal support, his mother claimed, he would have spent his time “bouncing off the walls.”

In university, his social issues had been eclipsed by the achievements brought on by his nearly photographic memory and dazzling skills in mathematics. He wrote a number of “fuzzy” search algorithms that were picked up by Lexis and Google. He was also the author of unique search programs that matched similarities across multiple databases. Turbee’s father, James Turbee, was the managing partner of an international law firm headquartered in Washington, DC, and had been able to utilize his firm’s intellectual property lawyers to negotiate reasonable compensation for these efforts. James Turbee also managed his son’s funds, which had become quite extensive; his net worth was well into the range of eight figures. Not that Turbee cared. As long as he had more computing power and larger screens than anyone else, he was content. So he came to be TTIC’s wunderkind, to play with one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. And with any luck, to find and stop terrorists in his free time.

Turbee’s first months in the new workplace had been rocky. He had not fit in very well; the majority of the staff avoided him. More than once he had been told by Dan, in aristocratic tones, to “take a shower and behave.” He was introduced daily to new and increasingly severe individuals from different components of the Intelligence Community. He hated dealing with strangers, and knew many of his colleagues more by footwear than facial characteristics. His deathly pale complexion and darkly circled eyes became a source of comment. Was he sick? Was he on drugs? People who tried to ask received either a silent shrug or no answer at all.

He became ostracized and quickly withdrew into his own world, allowing himself to take the role of outcast. TTIC was a miracle agency, but even among people who should have been smart enough to understand him, Turbee had become the misfit. His depression increased, and he looked for a way to silently disappear. Soon after he started working there, Turbee began retreating from the TTIC community on a regular basis by playing Internet video games instead of working. He’d almost immediately stopped participating in any of the agency’s social activities. Though possibly the smartest person on the entire team, Turbee was not a functioning member.

O
N ONE OF THOSE EARLY DAYS, before all the equipment was fully operational, when there were still technicians crawling under worktables and cables littering the stepped floors, there was a commotion, and a collective muttering of “oh shit.” A small detail of Marines entered through the rear doors, and one announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Through the doors stepped the man himself. He was wearing his usual awkward grin, and dressed casually, without a suit jacket or tie.

“Sit down, everyone,” said the President. “Get comfortable. I won’t take up too much of your valuable time.” Turbee noticed Dan’s purple features out of the corner of his eye. Clearly Dan had not been expecting this. No one had.

The crowd of engineers, technicians, scientists, and Intelligence personnel sat down as one, shocked. The techs without desks simply sat on the floor.

“I know that this is a little bit unusual,” said the President. “But I think it’s important for you to hear directly from me why you are here, and why this is going to be an agency of critical importance to my presidency, and those that will follow.

“You probably know that this country is still reeling from the terrorist attack we recently experienced,” he continued. “While it was not the first terrorist attack weathered by this country, it was the attack that woke us up. The entire nation could see that there was, for whatever reason, a frightful collection of terrorists aligned against us, with means of great destruction at their disposal. They declared war on the free and democratic nations of this world, and especially against our own country.

“There were, unfortunately, a great many Intelligence failures that led to these tragic events, and many committees, investigations, and inquiries have been created to find how this could have happened, and to make sure that it never happens again.”

There was a general nodding of agreement in the audience. The mood was electric. It wasn’t every day that the President dropped by to say good morning and welcome the team.

“One of the findings of all of those investigations,” the President continued, “was that there was not adequate coordination and communication between the various agencies charged with keeping the security of this nation. Too often, our Intelligence Agencies were passing one another like ships in the night, not being receptive to the information that other agencies had developed, or duplicating information unnecessarily. Sometimes the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. And too often, patterns that could have been gleaned from streams of information developed by different agencies were not discerned, primarily because information was not being shared. That’s where you guys come in.”

Suddenly the President gave one of the disarming “awe shucks” grins for which he was so famous. “We have in this room,” he continued, “some of the most respected analysts, gathered from all of the agencies that form our Intelligence Community. In addition, we have highly educated people hailing from our great universities: Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, Yale . . . maybe I should reverse the order,” he chuckled, and the room chuckled with him. “We have individuals in this room who have been station chiefs in Riyadh, in Islamabad, in Khartoum, and elsewhere. We also have people who excel in finding patterns in oceans of data where others see nothing but chaos.”

At that point Turbee saw those powerful eyes fall directly on him, and immediately looked down at his feet. The speech continued for a little longer, and he was impressed in spite of himself. Having only recently graduated from the university life, Turbee, like most university students, felt that the man was a twit and had come to power only because of his last name. But there was nothing stupid about this speech, and nothing weak about the man. Turbee felt a grudging respect begin to grow, and found that he was actually looking forward to working for and with this man. As the President finished his speech and was ushered out, Turbee wished he could go out and shake his hand, but found himself instead rooted to the floor.

A
T TTIC, the day began with a discussion of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, and the issues that it raised. The PDB was a briefing prepared every day for the President by the Office of Current Production and Analytic Support, a division of the CIA. Over the years, the PDB had been expanded, until the people handling it renamed it the National Intelligence Daily. During the Kennedy administration, it was reformatted and rearranged, and took on the appearance of a small newspaper. One President had even joked that it should contain a few ads and a sports section. It reflected the Intelligence Community’s perspective on the affairs of the present day, and was the most important newspaper in the country, possibly in the world. The PDB came into play when TTIC was charged with specific tasks by the Director of Central Intelligence or the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. On a number of occasions, the orders came directly from the President. Through hard work and the enormity of their responsibility, especially in regard to issues that made the front page of the PDB, the members of the team soon began to respect one another and to resemble the team that their President had directed them to be.