White: A Novel (16 page)

“Present your ID to the camera, sir,” an authoritative voice commanded. Jeremy held up his credentials, and after a few moments, the gate dropped. He was directed to a second building, where he presented his ID again and then signed mandatory nondisclosure forms. They took his cell phone and handed him a badge, a map, and a copy of base security protocols.

“Do you want my gun, too?” Jeremy asked, but one of the guards just laughed.

“Not as long as you HRT guys are as good as you say you are,” he said. “You’ve been billeted in bachelor officer’s quarters. Just follow the map and check in at the front desk. Wear your visitor’s pass at all times, observe posted speed limits, and have a nice day.”

Jeremy nodded and did as he was told. It had been a long trip, and the only thing in the world he wanted at that point was a flat place to lie.

SIRAD STEPPED INTO
an empty elevator and pressed seventeen. Though virtually everyone in the building had gone home for the night, she had assembled a cyber SWAT team of sorts to try to get to the bottom of what Jordan Mitchell assured her could mean the end of Quantis. The team of mathematicians, programmers, technicians, and engineers had already set up shop in the company’s security center, and she looked forward to a long night among their eccentricities.

Soon after starting down from twenty-six, the elevator stopped.

“Dammit,” she mumbled under her breath. Only one person would get on at twenty-four this time of night. It had to be Hamid.

“Mind if I get in?” he asked.

Sirad offered a polite smile and shook her head as he stepped aboard. The handsome Iranian-American oversaw Borders Atlantic’s financial operations, but she had known him on a whole different level. Sirad’s position at Borders Atlantic had always presented unique problems, and Hamid, unfortunately, had fallen among them.

“Look, Hamid,” she said. “It’s been a year. Are you ever going to let this pass?”

“How do you get over losing the love of your life?” he asked. “Does anyone ever get over that kind of betrayal?” He provided a smile that looked brave yet tortured.

“Please. We’ve been over this.”

Hamid reached out and hit every button between them and the seventeenth floor, delaying their descent.

“You’ve been over this,” he argued. “And only to tell me I wouldn’t understand.”

“You know I have work to do,” she said. “This is not the time or place to be having this discussion.”

Sirad reached into her purse for a lip gloss.

“Always work,” he lamented. “I’ve never known a person so incapable of love for anything but a career.”

The elevator finally stopped on seventeen, and Sirad stepped off without responding. Hamid followed.

“Evening, Ms. Malneaux, Mr. . . .” the door minder started to say, but Hamid grabbed Sirad’s arm and turned her toward him.

“When is the right place and the right time?” he asked. “All I ever wanted to know was why.”

Sirad cocked her head a bit, then pulled her arm from his hand. She looked genuinely puzzled.
What is it about the male ego that makes men so vulnerable to rejection?
she wondered.
Love is just something victims use to justify underlying weakness. Sex is the only truly honest and mutually beneficial element in any lasting relationship.
Why can’t I find a man who understands and accepts that?

“Are you OK, Ms. Malneaux?” the minder asked. Like everyone else at Borders Atlantic, he would have done just about anything to curry favor with this extraordinary beauty.

“Everything is just fine,” she said, shining a glossy smile while holding Hamid’s stare. “But could you be a dear and card me in? I seem to have forgotten my badge.”

The door clicked open as the magnetic dead bolts disengaged. Sirad turned away from the jilted lover and walked off ahead of him into what she knew would be a long night full of even less-pleasant engagements.

THE VICE PRESIDENT
was sound asleep on the couch in her Old Executive Office Building suite when a Secret Service agent alerted her to a call from the Oval Office. The president had requested an emergency briefing in the Situation Room, he said. The FBI had come up with new information that could impact national security, and further discussion simply couldn’t wait until morning.

Beechum splashed water on her face, brushed out her hair, and hurried into James’s office, where she found him sleeping under an overcoat beside his desk.

Forty-four hours,
she thought, leading the Secret Service caravan on a speed walk through a tunnel to the West Wing.
Two days the president has been working without sleep. How long can he function before fatigue causes serious lapses in judgment?

“All right, I’m here,” she announced, storming into the crowded and increasingly foul-smelling SITROOM. “What’s so damned important that we couldn’t wait to consider it in the morning with clearer heads?”

No one said a word at first. Havelock turned toward the secretary of defense, who looked to CIA director Vick, who deferred to Alred.

“Body count,” the president answered finally.

“Body count?” she repeated. “What do you mean, body count?”

“The body count is up to three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven,” Andrea Chase said. “The cable channels are running it nonstop. It’s official: we’ve exceeded the number of people killed on 9/ 11.”

Beechum raised her eyes and let out a coughlike laugh.

“That’s what we’re here at two o’clock in the morning to discuss?” she asked.

“This is a big number,” Venable said. “The American people are going to wake up in a few hours, and we need to be ready with a response. Andrea, why don’t you break it down for us.”

“One thousand seventeen killed in the three plane crashes—about eighty percent of them foreign nationals,” the chief of staff said. “Two thousand one hundred and ten in the three bombings; almost eighty-five percent Americans. You want individual counts by crisis site?”

“No, no . . . that’s quite sufficient.” The president sighed. He stood with his hands in his pockets. The vast amount of coffee he had consumed in the past two days made him tremble so badly, it embarrassed him.

“What can we say about the investigation?” Beechum asked. The fact that they would all lose a night of crucial sleep for something like this seemed too much to deal with at this point.

“As you know,” Alred answered, “we took down what we believed to be a safe house in Anacostia earlier this evening.”

“Believed to be?” Havelock asked accusingly. Personality clashes had begun to show.

“We’re still exploiting documents and hard drives that we recovered on-scene,” Alred continued, “but it looks like a bit of a dry hole at this point.”

“What?” Venable barked. “You said they were terrorists. You said they were . . .”

“We said they were suspects,” the FBI director snipped. At this hour, everyone felt more than a little raw. “Unfortunately, what we thought was a bomb-making operation turned out to be a credit card scam.”

“Oh, for Chrisakes!” Havelock tossed his pen onto the table in what everyone judged just a bit too much theater.

“This group appears to have had strong ties to radical mosques in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York,” Alred explained, “but it turns out that they were just trying to steal money. This was all about trying to rip off Muslims, not avenge them.”

No one said a word.

JEREMY AWOKE TO
a ringing phone. The early morning skies remained dark through polyester shades. Sky-blue wallpaper, simulated wood grain, and pine picture frames lent the room a certain trailer-park feel. The exhausted traveler thought for a moment that he was floating in some mildly pleasant dream, but then the phone rang again, and he reached to answer.

“Hello?” he asked on reflex. Jeremy had no earthly idea where he was.

“Mr. Waller?” someone asked. Male voice. Official.

“Yes.”

“Good morning, sir, this is Mr. Taylor. The base commander asked me to give you a call and brief you on today’s schedule.”

“Right,” Jeremy answered. He propped himself up on one elbow and reached for a pen and paper. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“We’ve got an all hands meeting in fifteen minutes at building twelve seventeen. We’ve got an EEI briefing set for zero-four-hundred, a walk-through at zero-six, psych workup at zero-nine, and chow at noon. Your people will be here at fourteen hundred for a UC ops scenario, then at seventeen hundred we’re back in the simulator until the evening meal at nineteen hundred. After that, we’ve scheduled in some study time.”

Jeremy managed to jot down the times. He’d figure out the rest once his mind flicked back on.

“Got it,” he lied. The clock read 2:29. He’d slept just an hour.

“A driver will be waiting downstairs,” Mr. Taylor said. “He’ll take you over to the officers’ mess. Coffee’s strong, black, and hot. You sound like you could use some.”

SIRAD WALKED DOWN
a hallway flanked on both sides by break-out rooms, technology pods, and secure compartmented information facilities. Jordan Mitchell had hired most of the seventeenth floor’s top administrators away from military intelligence agencies, and they had designed the Rabbit Hole by combining the best aspects of NSA, CIA, and DIA operations.

“Are we going to be able to work through this?” she asked. Hamid stayed a step behind her, fuming about her actions outside, but remaining professional.

“Like you said, Sirad, there’s a time and a place for everything.”

“Good,” she answered. “And this is neither.”

The two executives turned left, into an odd-looking section of the hallway that had been lined with highly sensitive electronic sensors. Originally designed for CIA and NSA facilities, this Z-shaped “wave path” worked like an electromagnetic shower, scouring incoming workers for anything that might serve as a receiver, transmitter, or microphone. Rabbit Hole designers had shielded the seventeenth floor with lead and other acoustic buffers, but there was no point in taking chances. Tape recorders, PDAs, laptops, even the company’s own encrypted Quantis cell phones, were prohibited.

“Why do I always feel like someone’s trying to peek up my skirt when I walk through here?” Sirad smiled. “Good thing I wore panties today, huh?”

Hamid shook his head as they emerged at the other end of the twenty-foot hallway and stepped into a large operations center built of teak, green glass, and chrome. Television monitors lined three of the octagonal room’s walls. White boards, projection screens, time line organizers, and world clocks covered two others. The rest of the space opened through smoked-glass windows into executive conference rooms.

Computer pods and cubicle work spaces covered much of the central floor space. Elaborate sound baffles hung from the ceiling, fifteen feet overhead. The floor itself was rubber.

“Project managers in Suite A!” Sirad called out.

Hamid, a numbers man at heart, counted twelve analysts in the Rabbit Hole’s main chamber. There should have been twice that many.

“Where is everyone?” he asked. And then a door opened, and he knew the answer. Suite A, one of the glass-walled break-out rooms to his right, was already full. The experts Sirad would rely on for answers had apparently already gotten down to business.

“What do we have?” Sirad asked, striding into the room. A nicely dressed “watchman” closed the door behind them. “I want to start at the beginning and work our way up step by step.”

“That may be difficult,” Ravi said. He had already covered an expansive white board with more of his equations, marks, and drawings. “Things have changed a bit since our last meeting. The analysis indicates something a bit more troublesome than we first thought.”

Sirad pulled out a chair beside an Asian man sporting a white lab coat with the name Lin embroidered over the left breast. He wore a crew cut that exposed numerous scars on his scalp, some partially obscured by his red Nike headband. A dozen other attendees had settled in behind stacks of paper and mechanical pencils. Sirad recognized none of them.

“What we seem to have is a symbiotic feed ingest,” Ravi continued. He directed a laser pointer at one of his drawings and reached for a can of Fresca. “This appears to be more a surveillance effort than an actual intrusion. The people behind this seem to be casing our system, probing the armor, if you will, for chinks.”

“Which means they haven’t actually broken in yet?” Sirad asked.

“That’s right,” Ravi conceded. “It’s kind of like a train robber riding alongside the money car. They are tracking the data stream, monitoring aspects of our infrastructure without actually exposing themselves as thieves.”

Sirad wondered about the Wild West analogy but found that it gave her a sense of the threat.

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” she asked. “If they haven’t actually made an attempt on the system, perhaps they haven’t compromised our codes. Do they know we’re onto them?”

“I don’t think so,” Ravi said. “We built hypersensitive countersurveillance mechanisms into the Quantis conduit.”

“Meaning we might have seen them before they see us?” Sirad asked.

“Precisely.”

“So if they haven’t broken in and they don’t know we’re watching them, what’s the bad news?”

Ravi pointed to a thin young black man sitting directly across from Sirad. What most impressed her was not his poorly shaped Afro, his “I Can’t Dunk” T-shirt, or the pencil that flipped rhythmically between his long, thin fingers. What really stood out was the intensity of his stare. Sirad actually felt a chill.

“This is a secret sharer probe.” The black man spoke firmly with a refined British accent. “In any coded exchange, both the sender and receiver must have a key. With the Quantis system, however, we’re talking about millions of subscribers, which requires a whole new way of looking at protocol.”

“You can’t give each user the key,” Sirad agreed. “You have to build it into the system.”

“Correct. That limits key access to a very small universe of system gatekeepers.”

“How small?” Hamid asked.

“In an ideal world, one,” I Can’t Dunk said. “But this is not an ideal world. I’m sure that Jordan Mitchell wishes he alone could control access to Quantis, but that’s just not possible. If something happened to him, the system would eventually die, suffocated within its own hermetically sealed skin.”