The Polaris Protocol (9 page)

C
rossing the border in Pike’s rental, the danger behind them, Jennifer felt the tension begin to fade, leaving her drained. She said, “How’d you find me?”

“Taskforce phone. Did you forget they’re interconnected? I was tracking you the minute I hit El Paso. I was scared shitless when I saw it had been stationary for my entire flight, then I picked up your movement to the industrial park. I couldn’t believe it when you shut it down. The one thing that I could use, and you turned the damn thing off.”

She felt her face flush, only now realizing the phone had saved her life. She snaked her hand into his and said, “I couldn’t talk. It was giving me away. . . . I thought I was on my own. . . .”

Pike glared at her. “I
told
you that you weren’t on your own. I said we’d figure this out together. I still can’t believe you did this. Did it help your brother? I broke a shit-ton of rules getting here, tracking phones, and . . .”

Jennifer leaned back, turning to face him. “And what? I should have listened, but my brother is in real trouble. He’s been kidnapped. I’m sure of it. I have a video in my purse, and a picture of the house he’s in.”

She expected support but saw the beginnings of a sneer. He said, “So what now, you want the Taskforce to assault a place in Mexico? Is that it? Because you got a voice message from your brother? Jennifer, we’re not the damn A-Team. You just made me kill two men in Mexico to save your ass.
You
did that, whether you like it or not, and it didn’t do a damn thing for your brother. All it did was prove a point.”

She dropped his hand. “What the hell does that mean? My brother’s not worth it? He’s probably being beaten to death right now, by men just like the ones you killed!”

He said nothing.

She said, “Pike?”

“It means maybe I can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. Maybe I can’t separate our relationship from the job. Maybe this was just a bad idea.”

What?

She said, “Stop the car. Right now.”

“Screw that. We need to get away from the border. Get away from the damage.”

“Stop this car right now or I’m jumping out.”

He looked at her, trying for bravado, but she saw apprehension at what had slipped out of his mouth. He pulled over, letting the other cars pass.

She said, “Who talked to you?”

“Nobody. I’m just thinking. I mean, I need to keep my head, and I’m not sure I can with our relationship. I’m not sure it’s right. Listen, I left a site survey early, got to Atlanta, then caught the first flight to El Paso because of you. I shortchanged a mission because of you. I’m not sure I can do both anymore.”

She stared at him for a second, then said, “So you mean because we’re together in the Taskforce, we can’t be
together
? Are you asking me to choose?”

He looked out the window. “I don’t know. I don’t
know
. I’m making decisions out of emotion, and I can’t do that in this world. With our business.”

She smiled, relieved at his answer. “So Knuckles talked to you.”

He said, “No, nobody talked to me.”

“Liar. He talked to me before I flew. Before the stakeout. He suspected and gave me the same line of bull.” She took his hand again and said, “Look, I can’t answer how you would react in combat without me in the mix, because I don’t know what you guys did before I arrived. I
do
know that all decisions have a basis in emotion. Just because emotion is there doesn’t make it wrong. It’s only wrong if the emotion leads to a bad one.”

“Jennifer, I just
made
a bad decision! I misused Taskforce assets and funding to get here.
And
killed two men. Based on our relationship.”

“And that was a
bad
decision? I’ve seen you ‘misuse’ Taskforce assets before. All for the good.”

He looked out the window again, saying nothing. She said, “Answer me this: Would Knuckles have gone to Mexico for his brother? With the voice mail that I got?”

He said, “Knuckles doesn’t have a brother.”

She took a breath and exhaled. “Just say he did, would he have gone to Mexico?”

He thought, and said, “Yes.”

“Would you have come and helped him, if he’d called, using whatever means were at your disposal?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes. I would have.”

“Then what the hell are we talking about?”

Pike closed his eyes for a moment. “You really twist up what I’m thinking.”

She squeezed his hand and said, “No I don’t. Others are doing that. And you know it.”

He let go of her hand and put the car in drive, saying nothing. She said, “You know that, right? I wouldn’t stay if I thought what you said was true.”

He said, “I know. It’s just that we can’t be pulling shit like this. The other times you mentioned were for national security. Averting risks to our nation, not something personal like this. It was wrong.”

She said, “Listen to the tape. I don’t think it’s just personal. I think it’s a Taskforce problem. Something bad’s going on, and I think it affects national interests.”

As she pulled out the recorder he said, “Jennifer, drugs might be a national problem, but they’re not Taskforce business. There’s a whole agency dedicated to that.”

She said, “Just listen. Jack might have been working on the cartels, but he found something different. There’s an American on here talking about something much bigger than drugs.”

“What?”

“Our GPS constellation.”

N
ot for the first time, Arthur Booth considered bringing mittens with him to work. The temperature inside his trailer was damn near freezing due to the number of servers, and it wasn’t like he was going to be banging away on a keyboard any time soon. Well, unless there was an anomaly in the system, which had happened only a few times since the Air Force officially accepted the latest upgrade to the GPS Architecture Evolution Plan.

Located behind the wire on one of the largest secure areas within the Department of Defense, the trailer was nowhere near as nice as the control room it supported two hundred meters away, but it was supposed to be temporary, and anything beyond the barest of requirements was a waste of money in the eyes of the defense contractor that maintained it.

Boeing had won the bid to create the next-generation Global Positioning System and had been working nonstop for over a decade to implement it. Designed to replace the aging, monolithic mainframes with a distributed network, along with launching more robust and capable satellites into space, it was an enormous undertaking that had to be accomplished seamlessly. Sort of like upgrading a propeller aircraft to a jet-capable one—while the aircraft continued to fly. Given the criticality of the system, it couldn’t be treated like cable TV, where the United States could tell the world, “Sorry for the inconvenience, but GPS will be experiencing some unpredictable outages over the next ten years. . . .”

And so Boeing built the system with robust backups, monitoring the architecture on a twenty-four/seven clock. The new AEP operational control segment at Schriever Air Force Base was fully functional now, monitoring the health of the global constellation of satellites, and Boeing, using Booth’s station, monitored the health of the control segment, reacting to any anomaly it found.

Booth, however, was watching for a very different reason. He
wanted
an anomaly. Wanted official access to the control segment. Wanted to be able to ostensibly solve a problem while introducing a new one.

Booth was a hacker and always had been, although he would say he was of the breed known as “ethical.” With ethics being decidedly in the eye of the beholder. He never compromised systems for financial gain, like eastern European Mafia groups, or for general mayhem, like a high school script kiddie defacing a pop star’s website. He only hacked for what he perceived as the greater good, exposing corporations and government evil, as it were.

Hacking, in and of itself, was nothing more than unauthorized penetration of computer systems. It was an action, not an attribute that could be spotted across a room at a party, and thus, like the group he sometimes worked with, he remained anonymous. The same skills he employed as a hacker were in great demand in his work as a computer technician, and thus he commanded a significant salary from Boeing, complete with a secret security clearance.

His initial foray into government employment had been with the CIA, where he’d applied to work in a cell developing some decidedly nefarious computer applications, something at the time he’d thought would be right up his alley, using his skills for the greater good in defense of the nation and gaining a sense of self-worth he couldn’t obtain by writing code designed to increase advertising sales. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pass the lifestyle polygraph test, which was designed to determine if there was a risk in exposing an applicant to national secrets. Apparently, he had been deemed risky and had been denied employment. Luckily for him, there was no such thing as cross talk among the divisions of the government, and Boeing didn’t require anything more than a background check, which had come up pristine.

Booth finished the initial survey for his shift and sat down, exhaling hard in an attempt to see his breath in the cold air but coming up empty. Having nothing else to do, he turned on his personal laptop after inserting a thumb drive with a boot segment that would control the laptop’s operating system. He placed his thumb on a small biometric scanner at the base of the keyboard and unlocked the system. Wading through various partitions, he pulled up an executable file called POLARIS.

He absently tapped the interface, checking for any glitches from his programming the night before, proud of his chosen name. Polaris was the North Star, which was the old-school, analog GPS that had guided navigation for centuries. He thought the name very apt, as the program would revert the world back to using it.

The executable file seemed to work fine and, in truth, would have worked fine a week ago. All he was doing now was refining the aesthetics of the interface while he waited to inject it into the GPS constellation, changing it from code only a computer maven could understand into an intuitive screen that anybody could use.

Booth hadn’t come into Boeing with any intent to harm. He wasn’t a mole who had spent decades wheedling his way into the inner circle. He was just a guy with expertise in computers who needed a day job so that he could execute his night activities and still eat. He worked so that he could
work,
righting the wrongs of the world as he saw them. That notion had changed as he became aware of the extent to which the GPS system controlled government and corporate actions. The satellite constellation was a sterile machine that did nothing but send out streams of ones and zeros. But the people who used the signals did some pretty nasty things.

Booth had worked with the hacktivist group Anonymous on multiple occasions and had even taken leave to protest Wall Street during the heady days of the Occupy movement—wearing the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask that was an Anonymous hallmark—but those had always been separate and distinct from his work at Boeing. It wasn’t until the United States government began killing its own citizens in Predator drone strikes that he decided to act.

The solution had been elegant in its simplicity, and he’d often wondered why he didn’t think of it before. He’d marched on Wall Street using analog methods when the digital destruction of that enterprise was staring him in the face the entire time.

GPS had been created solely as a military application, and as such it had been designed with safeguards in mind. Since the satellites blindly launched signals continuously, the military was worried that the very position, navigation, and timing features that would allow US smart weapons technology to dominate a future battlefield could also be used by an enemy, and they were determined to prevent that from occurring.

In essence, while incredibly complicated in execution, the concept of GPS was fairly simple. A receiver acquired a signal from a satellite, along with how long it took that signal to reach it. Once it had three or more of those signals, complete with the time it took each to reach its location, it simply triangulated its position based on its inherent knowledge of the satellites’ location. Easy.

The key was the timing signal, as it had to be nanosecond-precise to get an accurate location, and that was what the military adjusted. All thirty-five of the satellites currently in orbit had an application called selective availability embedded within them. With a flip of a switch, the military could turn on this feature for any satellite they wanted, which, in essence, simply altered the timing broadcast. In other words, the receiver would think it took X nanoseconds to reach it, when it really took Y. Thus, the receiver would triangulate an incorrect location. The military controlled the degree of offset, and the greater the aberration, the greater the error, but civilian use of the system had overcome the military monopoly.

The Department of Defense had begun to lose control of its creation since its inception, like water eroding a riverbank. It was just too good an application not to be capitalized on in the civilian market, even with selective availability. GPS became more and more entrenched in the public world, with the timing feature becoming embedded into the United States’ national architecture. Everything from bank transactions to cell phone towers to power grids used it. So much so that President Bill Clinton abolished the use of selective availability in the year 2000, and the new Block III satellites scheduled for launch in the next decade didn’t even include the feature.

But it was still there on the legacy systems that were currently in space. All Booth had done was create a program that could access it. With his own personal switch, he could cause every single GPS-enabled device to fail—including the military-only encrypted signal—whether it was a red light in New York City that solely needed accurate timing or a train switchyard that needed accurate positioning of its customers. Or, in his mind, a corrupt banking system that utilized GPS timing for every single transaction and a fleet of Predator UAVs armed with Hellfire missiles looking for something to kill.

Creating the program had been simple. Getting into the satellites was what had proven hard. The 2nd Space Operations Squadron was responsible for all functions of the GPS constellation, and it controlled them from inside a building that had more security than the CIA. His trailer was only a stone’s throw away, but he wasn’t allowed on the floor of the new operational control segment and could only access the system when asked to because of an anomaly, using the network inside his trailer. And so he was forced to wait.

His freezing little work trailer did provide one benefit, though. Because of its criticality, the entire GPS architecture was air-gapped from the World Wide Web, completely stovepiped to prevent hackers such as him from infiltrating. The only connectivity was with his trailer—which
was
wired into the Internet, but through Boeing work systems that weren’t involved in the GPS maintenance. It had been a simple matter to fix that.

Now, in theory, once the script was embedded in the satellites, he could activate it from anywhere. Which was a good thing, because he wanted to be nowhere in the chain of evidence when it went operational. It would look like a simple hacking penetration of Boeing, causing some security analyst to lose his job back in DC but not pointing at Booth.

It was why he’d gone to El Paso in the first place. Two weeks ago he’d been surprised when his dealer had “bumped into” him in a bar in downtown Colorado Springs, the nearest town from his work at Schriever.

Booth had never been into heavy drugs, but he had a marijuana habit that was out of control and had racked up quite a bit of debt. His dealer had always been courteous, but the menace of nonpayment had hung above Booth’s head like an anvil waiting to fall. That threat had come crashing down with voters passing Amendment 64. Now that marijuana was legal in Colorado, the dealer saw his profits dwindling and had demanded immediate payment on the debt, something Booth couldn’t afford outright. The dealer hadn’t punished him—yet—but instead had given him time to collect the money, and he had introduced Booth to a man named Carlos, a supposed hacktivist from Mexico.

Booth had gone along, but he had suspected from the beginning who he was talking with. Carlos knew computers but not much about the hacking fraternity, which had raised Booth’s suspicions. Not a great deal, but some. Because of events he’d rather have kept buried, he knew a thing or two about activities in Mexico.

Two years ago, the group Anonymous had threatened Los Zetas because they had allegedly kidnapped one of its members in Mexico, saying they were going to expose every corrupt official involved with Los Zetas unless the man was released. Los Zetas, in routine fashion, threatened to kill ten men for every one exposed. At that, Anonymous had backed down, claiming the man had been freed. No corrupt officials’ names had been released. Booth had no idea if the man had even been kidnapped but had worked with Anonymous to locate the officials collaborating with the cartel, compiling a database in an effort he felt was worthwhile.

After the Zetas’ threats, and further indications that they were actively recruiting their own hackers to track down Anonymous members, Booth had become somewhat of an expert on the cartels, working to protect his own skin instead of exposing Mexican corruption.

Using those same computer linkages, he’d researched Carlos and had found a few interesting things. Not much, but enough to determine that if he was aligned with a cartel, it was Sinaloa and not Los Zetas, which gave him the confidence to continue. Sinaloa hated Los Zetas, and thus would probably pay him a bonus instead of cutting off his head. In the end, he didn’t care how POLARIS was released, as long as it didn’t lead back to him. Like the group, he wished to remain anonymous.

He was gazing at his creation, toying with the idea of adding a row of slide switches that looked like an old stereo equalizer bar, when a flashing light caught his eye from the bank of computer monitors. He stared for a full second, in a little bit of shock. It was an alert sent from the operational control segment located in the secure building two hundred meters away. There had been a glitch, and they were requesting that he find it. Nothing crucial, but enough to warrant a bug fix. Enough to warrant his rooting around in the new operational control segment for hours.