The Cyclops Initiative (5 page)

“I suppose we did do that,” Hollingshead replied. “And revenge is a perfectly sound motive in this sort of thing. But there's one problem. We took down Tom Banks and his directorate of the CIA quite successfully. He's not there anymore, nor are any of his ­people. He was replaced by Harry West. An old friend of mine—­in fact, he got the job because I personally recommended him.”

“So we can cross the CIA off the list,” Chapel said. “At least that's something. I really don't want to think this was an inside job—­that somebody in the intelligence community dropped a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.”

“I imagine none of us do. Though part of our job is to take on the unthinkable,” Hollingshead said. He leaned forward and gestured through the windshield.

Up ahead a sign by the side of the road indicated that the upcoming exit ramp was only a quarter of a mile away.
NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY
, it read.

“Take this exit,” Hollingshead told Chapel. “They'll be expecting us.”

FORT MEADE, MD: MARCH 21, 11:18

Military vehicles sat on either side of the off-­ramp, and an armed guard stood in the middle of the road, waving them in. Hollingshead rolled down his window and held up his identification and the guard just nodded. He gave them some quick directions toward their destination and then warned them what would happen if they wandered too far off course. Chapel made a point of following the directions exactly.

NSA headquarters, in comparison to the NGA building they'd just left, looked like a boring rectangular office building—­nothing special. Of course Chapel knew that appearances could be deceiving. The glass panes that fronted the building were all one-­way mirrors that had been coated with a film of copper so no one could bounce a radio signal through them. Information entered the building through a thousand conduits, but none ever came out.

The building stood in the middle of the largest parking lot Chapel had ever seen. An attendant came out and guided him into a numbered spot. “Kept it open just for you,” the man said with a big grin. “You'll want to head into that white building there, the Visitor Control Center. Have a great day!”

Together the three of them headed into the indicated building, where a line of metal detectors and backscatter booths waited. Sighing, Chapel started to unbutton his uniform tunic again, intending to take his arm off before someone asked him to. Before he could get more than one button undone, however, a woman in a blue blazer came running up. “No need, sir, no need!”

“I have a prosthetic arm,” he told her, launching into a speech he'd used a thousand times before. “It'll set off the metal detectors and—­”

“Yes, Captain, we know,” she said, reaching for his good arm. “If you'll just come this way. All three of you. We have a special detector suite warmed up. Don't worry, Director Hollingshead, we know about your pacemaker as well, there's no danger.”

Chapel gave the director a glance, but Hollingshead simply favored him with a tiny sympathetic shake of his head. Together the three of them passed into a series of gray felt-­covered partition walls at one end of the security station. Chapel was certain he was being scanned as he walked through, but he had no idea what kind of detectors they used. At the far end they were given blue security badges embedded with tiny RFID chips embedded in the plastic. “Don't worry about getting lost,” the woman explained. “If you end up someplace you're not supposed to, those chips will sound an alarm and somebody will come to collect you. If you tamper with the chips, that'll set off the alarm, too, so try not to touch them too much.” She gave them a big, warm smile. “Welcome to the Puzzle Palace!”

“Thank you, my dear,” Hollingshead said. His genial professor act was back in place. “If you could, ah, be so kind as to direct us . . .”

“No need,” she said, bobbing her head. “Just go over there to elevator bank two.”

Chapel frowned. There really should have been someone to meet them and take them to—­well, wherever they were headed. When they arrived at the elevator bank, though, he saw why that wasn't necessary. With a pleasant little chime the nearest elevator opened its doors. Stepping inside, he saw that one of the floor buttons was already lit. Obviously the floor they wanted.

Wilkes leaned over toward Chapel's ear. “You know that feeling, when you're being watched? You can feel it on the back of your neck?”

“Yeah,” Chapel said.

“Right now I got that feeling on the front of my neck, too.”

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “Boys, I'd appreciate it if you could try to remember that everything you say and do inside this building is being written down somewhere. Logged, as they say, for posterity.”

The elevator opened again on a broad lobby full of potted plants. No one was there to meet them, but at the far side of the lobby a green light appeared over a door. They headed through into a cavernous room Chapel thought looked like nothing so much as a deserted casino.

The lighting was subdued and mostly blue. The thick carpet under his feet was red with an abstract pattern of yellow lines. On the walls, massive display screens showed a rotating NSA logo. The ceiling was studded with black glass domes that he was certain hid cameras that tracked his every move. Instead of slot machines, however, the room contained dozens of gleaming workstations, each with a padded chair and a high-­end laptop.

Two ­people waited for them at the far end of the huge room. One was a woman dressed in an air force uniform, while the other was a civilian in a sweater vest and khaki pants. At first Chapel thought the woman was very short, but as they approached he realized that it was just that although the civilian wasn't very tall—­probably six and a half feet—­he was so thin; Chapel found himself thinking this was the tallest little guy he'd ever met. His hair was short but somehow messy, which just added to the impression. He didn't make eye contact as the two groups came together.

The woman was perhaps sixty years old, with short, curly hair and warm eyes. She gave them a high-­wattage smile and reached out with both hands for Hollingshead. “Rupert!” she exclaimed. “How lovely to see you again.” And then she actually pecked him on the cheek.

The director squirmed away as if a boa constrictor was trying to wrap itself around his throat. “Good morning, Charlotte,” he said. He turned and looked back at Chapel and Wilkes. “Boys, meet Colonel Charlotte Holman.”

Chapel came to attention and offered her a salute. Wilkes did the same after a moment's hesitation.

“Oh, please,” Holman said, laughing. “No need for that. We're all friends here. We're very nearly family!”

Chapel held the salute. Eventually, a little awkwardly, Holman returned it. “At ease, Captain,” she said, shaking her head in amusement.

Chapel wished he had any idea whatsoever what was going on.

FORT MEADE, MD: MARCH 21, 11:26

“Colonel Holman,” Hollingshead tried to explain, “is an old acquaintance. I didn't actually expect her to come meet us here.”

“I'm the subdirector for the S1 Directorate. Customer Relations,” she told Chapel and Wilkes. It took Chapel a moment to realize that meant she was an interagency liaison. The NSA had no field agents like himself—­it simply gathered information, which it then passed on to other organizations like the DIA. Holman, then, was responsible for that dissemination. He had forgotten that the NSA used business lingo to refer to its activities—­the information it provided was referred to as its “products” and the security agencies it served were its “customers.”

“Normally on a case like this you'd be meeting with my director,” Holman told them, “but he's still back at that incredibly tense briefing you came from.” She mocked a shiver. “Pretty scary stuff, huh?” She laughed again. Chapel got the impression she laughed a great deal, even about inappropriate things like a dirty bomb attack. “Rupert thought he was going to just come over here and somehow miss seeing me altogether, but I'm a little too sly for that.”

“Now, now, Charlotte, I had no intention of—­”

“I can see by the looks on your faces you'd like to know what there is between us,” she said.

Chapel had to admit he was mildly curious.

“I'll tell you, but it's a secret, so, shush!” She mimed locking her lips with a key. “Rupert and I dated once upon a time.”

“Once being the operative term, I'm, uh, afraid,” Hollingshead said. “It was ten years ago. My wife had, well, passed and some . . . mutual friends. Set us up. As it were.”

“It was lovely,” Holman told them. “Who would have thought in this day and age there were any true gentlemen left? Rupert was wonderful. Such a shame it didn't work out.”

Hollingshead was actually blushing. Chapel couldn't help but be fascinated—­he knew nothing at all about the director's personal life. The man kept such things intensely private. He didn't like seeing his boss in such obvious distress, but considering the reason, well—­

“I wasn't, er, ready,” Hollingshead said. “To. You know. Date again.”

“One day you will be,” Holman said, with a twinkle in her eye. “I'll get my hooks in you yet, Rupert.” She laughed again.

Chapel knew, in an instinctive way, that this flirtatious persona was just that. If Rupert Hollingshead only pretended to be a bumbling absent-
minded professor, Charlotte Holman was putting on just as much of an act. But it worked. He had just met this woman. She outranked him. Yet he had to keep reminding himself he shouldn't trust her—­she just seemed so harmless.

“Oh, where are my manners?” she said. “I still haven't introduced Paul. Paul, please say hello to our friends from the DIA.”

The skinny guy in the sweater vest held out one hand for them to shake. He didn't make eye contact, though. “Paul Moulton,” he muttered. “I'm an analyst in Tailored Access Operations.”

“One of our very best,” Holman said, reaching up to put a hand on the man's shoulder. “When Rupert asked for our help, I knew Paul was exactly the man we needed. He'll help you find this bad guy, be assured of it.”

“I'm afraid time is at a premium,” Hollingshead said. “Do you think we could, ah, get down to it?”

“Of course,” Holman said. She led them over to one of the workstations. Moulton sat down in the chair and logged in. Holman looked over at Hollingshead. “So tell us exactly what you're looking for today.”

The way she said it left Chapel with no doubt she already knew, but she wanted Hollingshead to say it out loud. That way he actually had to ask her—­which meant he would owe her something. He shuddered to imagine having to operate on the level these two took for granted. The endless games, the rivalries between agencies—­he wondered what kind of brain it took to keep it all straight.

“Someone hijacked a Predator drone this morning. That is to say,” Hollingshead told her, “they fed it control data that was not authorized by any governmental or military body. We need to know who did it, that's all. A physical location would be nice, but a name would be even better.”

Holman nodded. “I imagine we can do that. Funny, though. Normally you could take care of this yourself, couldn't you?”

“The analyst I would usually turn to,” Hollingshead said, glancing away, “is unavailable at the moment.”

“How frustrating. Paul, can you bring up data on the drone fleet?” She turned to face Chapel and Wilkes. “Communications with the drones is all logged, of course, recorded and stored on Department of Defense servers. Paul—­mirror your screen to display three, please.”

One of the big screens on the wall lit up with an image of the workstation's desktop. Moulton opened an application that showed a list of files all dated in the last twenty-­four hours. There were hundreds of them. “What you see here,” Holman said, “is computer code describing what the Predators were doing at a given time, whether that means shifting the inclination of an aileron or turning off their cameras or, for sake of argument, firing a Hellfire missile.”

“All these drones were in the air?” Chapel asked.

“No, most of those are just for UAVs still sitting in their hangars,” Holman explained. “They send a constant stream of updates and checklists back to command, even when they're inactive, just so we can keep track of where they are.”

“I'll highlight the active ones,” Moulton said. On the screen only a half-­dozen or so listings changed to blue. “It's one of these?”

Hollingshead put on his glasses and studied the screen. “There. The one that just stops at 05:51:14,” he said, pointing at the big display. Chapel realized that must be the moment when the Predator hit the cargo container and destroyed itself—­putting it off-­line.

Moulton isolated the listing and expanded it. It looked like so much gibberish to Chapel—­just line after line of numbers and strings of letters he knew he would never understand.

Hollingshead walked over to the screen. “Here.” He pointed at a line that read 10.0.0.1. “This lists the IP address for the incoming commands, yes?”

Holman nodded. “That's right.”

Chapel tried to remember everything he'd heard Angel say about IP addresses. He knew they were pretty useful. “If you know that, you can track the command back to whoever issued it, right? You can get their physical location.”

“You might,” Holman said, “except of course the hijacker would know that. So he went to the trouble of altering the IP address on his outgoing commands. 10.0.0.1 is a default IP address—­just a placeholder. It doesn't mean anything.”

“You can do that?” Chapel asked.

“It's actually pretty easy,” Moulton told him.

“So . . .” Chapel shook his head. “So we're seeing the actual code the hijacker used to control the Predator. But that code doesn't tell us anything useful. They've hidden themselves and there's no way to find out who they are.”