Off the Grid (19 page)

Gudenkauf squeezed Nate’s arm. “I love this part,” she said. “Now Bill is going to tell you how we’ll kill the evil, diseased brain of the U.S. government.”

“We’re going to act like a smart boxer,” Henn said. “Instead of head shots, we’re going to do a series of body shots. We’re going to knock out all the infrastructure that keeps the brain cool. Kill the body . . .”

“. . . and the head will die,” Nate finished.

“Exactly.”

“Bill knows everything about the data center,” Ibby said. “He knows where the cooling towers are most vulnerable, where the power plant can be breached, and where to hit the water plant and
the chiller plants. Once they’re all shut down, the brain will fry itself into a silicon block that can never be used again.”

Nate shook his head, still skeptical. He said, “I just can’t buy it that the people inside that facility would stand around and let the supercomputer and the storage of all those records just burn up. Aren’t there manual ways of just shutting it all down before it seizes up?”

“Sure,” Henn said. “It’s not easily done, and there’s no doubt some of the data would be corrupted before they could get it all shut down, but
sure
, they could do it.”

“And that would preserve what they’d already collected, right?” Nate said. “So after they get everything repaired that you knocked out, they’d still have all those records stored away. It might take a while, but once they’ve got the place running again, they wouldn’t even have to start over.”

“Look,” Ibby said, interrupting. “We really don’t want to reveal everything to you right now, but what you need to know is we’ve got it figured out.”

Henn smiled slowly. Nate could tell that he really wanted to let him in on the whole plan because he was very, very proud of it.

Nate pressed on. “The head may die, but they can bring it back to life once they get the body repaired, right?”

“Right,” Henn said. “Unless, hypothetically, there was a bug in the overall facility’s computer programming that is so masked and hidden away no one could ever find it. Let’s say, again hypothetically, that the bug is designed to come to life only upon
a reboot of the entire system
. And playing this out, let’s say the bug would infect the system so rapidly that it would corrupt all of the remaining records before they could be searchable.”

“Which means,” Ibby said, sharing Henn’s enthusiasm, “if they
bring that facility back to life, they’ll find it’s filled with gibberish. No phone records, no metadata they can use. If they want, really want, to pursue this illegal data collection, they’ll have to totally rebuild from the ground up. That will take years and billions more dollars. By then, I hope, the citizens of the nation will stand up and say, ‘No, damn you. Not again
.
’”

•   •   •

“K
NOWIN
G YOUR BACKGROUND
, I’ve got a question for you,” Ibby said to Nate.

Nate responded with raised eyebrows.

Ibby moved to the doorway so he could click on a set of lights that illuminated the previously darkened corner of the room. Nate noted a large schematic map headed
UTAH DATA CENTER
taped to a whiteboard. Next to the map were aerial photos of the facility shown in context to the landscape surrounding it.

“Here it is,” Ibby said, approaching the map. The huge facility itself was peanut-shaped and ran north to south. It was outlined by high fences. The largest buildings within the compound were dead center and were labeled
DATA HALLS 1 & 2
and
DATA HALLS 3 & 4
. Between them was an oblong administration building.

Flanking the data halls to the north and south sides were power buildings, chiller plants, water storage, fuel tanks, and six cooling towers built cheek by jowl.

A power substation and power line coming from Bluffdale to the north sat outside the perimeter of the fence. On the southeast bend of the perimeter was a visitor center.

Ibby said, “If you were to hit this facility with two trailer-mounted EMP pulses, where would you set up?”

Nate approached the map and studied the aerial photographs. The UDC sat on a huge flat swale beneath some foothills to the east. There was no residential housing in the area outside the perimeter. Only sagebrush.

Nate jabbed his index finger on the image. “It looks like there’s a series of checkpoints along the road before you can even get to the visitor center, so unless you plan to crash through them, that’s not an option. The north end, toward Bluffdale, looks level, but there are no paved roads to get near it.”

He looked over at Ibby, to find him nodding.

Nate gestured to a set of foothills to the west of the facility that appeared to overlook it.

“Here,” Nate said, indicating the foothills. “You’d be above the buildings just outside the perimeter fence. If you stationed one device to the northeast and the other to the southeast, you could fire down in a pincer design.”

He bent over and studied the image closely. “There are no paved roads up there, either, but it looks like there are some old Jeep roads and two-tracks. It doesn’t look too steep for a vehicle.

“And when the attack is over,” he said, “you could take I-15 north to I-80 and get the hell out of there.”

He looked up to find Ibby and Henn nodding in agreement.

“It’s good to get a second opinion from someone who has actually conducted a raid in the real world,” Ibby said. “And that’s exactly what Henn and I thought.”

Nate said, “How you’d ever get two big EMP weapons up there without being detected is another matter.”

“Yes, it is,” Ibby said with a grin.

Henn led the procession up another ladder and Nate found himself in the first shed. Two huge eighteen-wheelers were parked next to each other. Electronics gear and thick coils of wire littered the floor space between them. The inside walls of the shed were papered with technical schematics.

“Let’s see the EMP devices before the volunteers get here,” Ibby said to Henn. “That’ll be any minute.”

To Nate, Ibby said, “Bill works them like dogs, I’m happy to say. He’s had a crew every weekend for two months helping out. Suzy used her courier network to get the word out, and they just started showing up like magic. A few of them do technical stuff, and one guy is a really good welder. But for the most part, they do mundane work like janitorial and cleanup, schlepping tools and gear—that kind of thing. They completely donate their time and all we do is feed them and show them a good party at the café when they’re
done. This is the last weekend we’ll need them, so I don’t want us to distract them while they work.”

Nate nodded. He didn’t want the volunteers, especially Sheridan Pickett, to wander in, either.

The presence of Sheridan surprised him. Although he knew her to be smart and daring, he’d never thought of her as a radical.

Of course, she
had
been in college for four years.

•   •   •

A
S THEY WALKED DOWN
the length of the vehicles, Nate noticed that one trailer was emblazoned with the logo for a heavy-duty industrial battery company and the other had the name of a familiar over-the-road commercial carrier.

He barely listened as Henn explained how the battery truck had arrived filled to the brim and how they’d off-loaded only half of the units and placed the remainder in the other trailer.

They walked to the wide-open back ends of the two trucks. Reinforced steel ramps stretched from the dirt floor to the bottom lip of the trailer box.

The EMP devices filled the long fifty-two-foot trailers. Nate had expected them to look high-tech, but what he saw seemed almost medieval: glimpses of large yellow Caterpillar generators in the back wired into walls of batteries, huge slabs of discolored steel welded together, a massive spool of copper wire the size of a pickup, a spoked snout that protruded from it all aiming out the back-door opening. Nate caught the gist of how the EMP worked: the generators charged the batteries, industrial capacitors and copper wire amplified the power, and the burst was fired through the snout.

In theory, Henn said, each EMP device had two full-power blasts in it before the generators had to be used to recharge the batteries. That would take several hours.

“How many times do you plan to fire it?” Nate asked.

Henn and Ibby looked at each other.

“Let’s just say that we hope we won’t have to recharge the batteries at all,” Henn said.

“So what do you think?” Ibby asked, moving his eyes from Nate toward the entrance door as the voices of the volunteers increased in volume.

“I don’t know
what
to think,” Nate said. But he was impressed.
Very
impressed. Cobbling together a high-tech weapons system in the middle of a desert without outside power was a magnificent technical achievement. Plus, Ibby seemed to have his heart in the right place. Nate was nagged by the thought that perhaps he was on the wrong side in this adventure.

“We’ll talk about it in a minute,” Ibby said. “I need to give our volunteers a pep talk when they come in. It’s important they’re motivated to finish up today.

“I wish I could attract a higher class of volunteers,” Ibby added, “but this is the hand I was dealt. We’ve learned we can’t keep them longer than a weekend at a time. They get bored easily and they aren’t exactly hard workers, I’m afraid. It’s important to keep them motivated.”

“We’ll meet you afterward,” Gudenkauf said, tugging on Nate’s arm. Henn stayed with Ibby.

Nate went with her willingly, and he heard the volunteers pour into the third shed just as they climbed down the ladder into the dark hallway.

Sheridan hadn’t seen him.

•   •   •

B
EFORE THEY REACHED
the control room, Suzy Gudenkauf pulled Nate aside and grasped his hands in hers.

“Look,” she said, “Ibby’s motivating the volunteers and Saeed should be back any minute with your Jeep and your falcons. We don’t have much time, so I need you to listen up.

“I don’t know you, but Ibby obviously trusts you. What I’m asking you, what I’m begging you right now, is to watch out for him. Protect him. He’s in over his head and he refuses to believe it.”

“What do you mean?” Nate asked.

She gripped his hands harder. She was strong.

“Ibby is a charismatic leader. He’s a great guy and a true believer in this. He’s been able to pull us all together here to work in these conditions for months, and we do it because we believe in it and we believe in him. It takes someone really special to lure me out of Palo Alto into the middle of fucking nowhere just to help him out. He’s an American patriot and I believe in him, just like everyone here does. Who would have thought that a Muslim not even born in this country would have the guts and the courage to do what the sheeple out here won’t do? But I think right now he’s in terrible danger, and maybe we all are.”

“From the NSA?”

“Probably, if they knew what we were doing,” she said. “But no, he’s in danger from within.”

She pressed closer and Nate felt the wall at his back. She looked both ways to make sure no one was coming down the hallway.

“When Saeed showed up, it made some sense to me,” she continued. “Bill Henn and the rest of them are a bunch of tech geeks, and
we needed security. I came because of my connections with the billionaire tech people who wanted to help fund this. We aren’t soldiers—we’re activists. We welcomed Saeed because he seemed devoted to Ibby.

“Although it might not look like it, Saeed has gradually taken over. Even Ibby doesn’t seem to realize it. Saeed’s impatient, and he keeps pushing. When our cash flow slowed down, Saeed gave me some contacts for more funding and they came through, but it was all real sketchy. I know they came from shell corporations that I’m guessing were set up to launder money for some other purpose. What I do know is that the funds came from overseas in the Middle East and Europe.

“I was willing to overlook that, but Saeed kept moving in. While I was working on a deal to
buy
all the batteries we needed, Saeed used his contacts to go out and hijack a truck on I-80 and drive it here. God knows what happened to the driver,” she said with a shiver.

“Ibby seems to trust him,” she stated, “but I don’t. Not after he brought in those other two guys. Do you know how they got here?”

Before Nate could answer, she said, “They came over the border from Mexico. One’s Yemeni, the other Syrian.”

“Which is which?” Nate asked.

“The tall skinny one with the beard is from Yemen. The nasty fat one is Syrian.”

“He hit me with a stun gun,” Nate said, reaching up and touching his fingertips to the burn marks on his neck.

“Not surprising,” she said. “Late last night, I saw the Syrian drive out of here a couple of hours after Ibby sent those two loser volunteers away. I just had this feeling he was going to pick them up and take them somewhere.”

“I know where that was,” Nate said. “Did Ibby know about it?”

“No,” she said. “He was hunkered down with Henn working out a few last details. The Syrian was back here a couple of hours later and he was alone.”

“Did you tell Ibby?”

“He won’t listen when I complain about Saeed or his men,” she said quickly. “He thinks I’m trying to guard my territory. Plus, the closer we get to deploying the EMPs, the more focused he is on the mission. He ignores distractions . . . like me.”

Nate could tell by the way she said it that there was history between Ibby and Suzy Gudenkauf that went beyond the team. They’d been romantically involved, and for one reason or another they no longer were.

She took a deep breath and said, “I think they’re connected to ISIS or al-Qaeda, and I think they’re going to use our EMPs for terror attacks.”

“What?”

“Think of what terrorists could do beyond the destruction of the UDC. I think Saeed just wants these EMPs. Imagine what a terrorist could do with them—they can go after government buildings, hospitals, stadiums, senior centers, power substations, you name it.”

Nate’s mind spun. The legitimate purpose of the NSA facility was to gather electronic records so they could drill down into the metadata to detect terrorists talking to each other. If the entire facility was off-line, bad guys all over the world would have free rein. Plus, he
could
imagine purposes for EMP devices hidden in the back of eighteen-wheelers moving across America’s highway system. The devices could be used to bring down airplanes as they took off or landed at airports, to derail trains, to disrupt the electrical grid,
or to take out radar installations that could warn about impending missile attacks.

She paused. “We’ve built an awesome weapon.”

“Yes, you have,” he said.

“This thing is getting way out of control,” Suzy said. “If Saeed takes those EMP devices from Ibby . . .” She shivered again. “You’ve got to stay close to him and make sure they don’t hurt him. Please don’t let them hurt Ibby—or any of us.

“Maybe you can talk with them,” she said. “For whatever reason, they’ve let you inside their circle, so they must respect you. Maybe you can take them aside and explain in a calm and rational way that they need to leave Ibby alone, and they need to let us do our work.”

Nate grinned.

“Why is that funny?” she asked.

He said, “Might as well ask me to reason with a snake. Snakes are snakes. Tigers are tigers. You can’t
reason
them out of what they are. The only thing you can do is kill them.”

She cringed at that.

Nate said, “There’s only three of them. I need to get my weapons back. Do you know where they keep them?”

She shrugged. “There’s an armory room underneath shed number three. I’d guess that’s where they are, but it’s locked up.

“One more thing,” she said. Her eyes were wide. “I think there may be more of Saeed’s men on the way.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The volunteers used to stay in kind of crappy dorm rooms we built in the first shed. Even though it turned out to be more of a
party atmosphere than we really wanted around here—as you can imagine—we didn’t want them out wandering around where an eye in the sky could spot them. But as you can see, this weekend they were asked to bring camping gear so they could stay outside in tents. It’s a breach of security, but I didn’t give it much thought at first. But if Saeed needs those rooms . . .” She trailed off.

She said, “Saeed sends messages via my courier network. I don’t look at them, and I don’t know who they go to. But in the last month, he’s been sending
a lot
of messages.”

Nate, once again, recalled the dream he’d had back on the Bucholz ranch. In the dream, there had been more of the enemy than he had bullets.

He’d had plenty of time to play the dream over again in his head. Each time, he couldn’t conjure up a way where it would end well for him. What he never could have guessed from his dream, though, was that there would be other lives at stake as well.

And he thought:
I’ve got to recover that phone and get Sheridan out of here
.

•   •   •

N
ATE
THANKED
S
UZY
G
UDENKAUF
and strode through the control room. He ignored the curious looks of Ibby’s team as he passed them, although he nodded toward a rumpled man who stood near the ladder. Nate walked with such purpose, he thought, that the man stepped aside for him and didn’t ask where he was going.

After scrambling up through the entrance and across the shed, he closed the door behind him and looked around. No one but him, it seemed, was outside.

He’d made his decision quickly. Ibby had, perhaps, noble intentions. In another circumstance, Nate knew he might have thrown in with him. But what Suzy had told him had poisoned the well.

He duckwalked below the windows of the first shed so he couldn’t be seen. As he did, he could hear snatches of a speech Ibby was giving to the volunteers.

“. . . The Founders were brave and honorable patriots who put their best interests aside to stand up for the ideals of liberty and freedom . . .”

Nate paused at the corner of the first shed when he could see the expanse of the desert swale to the west. The empty tents were between him and the dry streambed he’d used to get there.

“. . . Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, said, ‘I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.’”

Far in the distance, miles away, were two tiny dots. Vehicles coming: Saeed’s and his own Jeep. He’d have maybe a minute or two to retrieve the satellite phone, install the battery, and scramble back before they arrived. If he hurried, he thought, he could make it to the third shed and find the armory . . .

“Someday, folks, you’ll look back at this time and you’ll know that your efforts helped usher in a renewal of our founding principles. You’ll know that you did your part to take America back . . .”

•   •   •

A
T FIRST
, Nate thought he was at the wrong gopher hole because, when he reached inside, there was no phone.

He cursed, and scanned the stream bank, wondering how he’d gotten turned around. No, he concluded, he was in the right place.

Then he realized someone had gotten there before him and had taken it.

Saeed, the Syrian, and the Yemeni were getting closer and he could hear their distant motors.

This wasn’t his dream yet, though, he thought. In his dream he was armed and doomed.

Now he just felt doomed.