The Cyclops Initiative (32 page)

She didn't bother denying it. “Fine, you've got me. I have to admit I'm impressed.”

Moulton didn't respond verbally, but Chapel could tell those words meant something to him. How long had he been following them around, really? How long had he been watching their every move?

“I'm curious about one thing,” Angel said. Maybe just to buy them more time before they were shot. Maybe because she was curious. “How did you know we were coming here tonight?”

“This is the data center where everything started,” Moulton said.

Angel shook her head. “No, I get that. But you knew we were coming here
tonight
. I don't believe you've just been sitting here for days, waiting for us to figure things out.”

“No,” Moulton admitted. “That's true.”

“You had to get all those robots out here. And Wilkes and yourself. All at the same time,” Angel pointed out.

“It took some work, yeah.”

“So how did you know?” Angel asked.

“I'm an analyst. I crunched the numbers,” he said. He took a deep breath as if he were about to give a lecture. “When you went online, in Pittsburgh. With all those video-­game consoles—­that was very clever, by the way. But red flags went off all over my screens. It was obvious that it was you, Angel, and not anybody else. Wilkes stopped you, but I knew you were still out there. That you might have a copy of the server logs from when I zombified your system. So I went through those logs myself, looking for anything you might find, anything you could use. I got inside your head, thought like you, mined the data like you would. And I found those stray packet headers, the ones with the plain text IP addresses. And I knew you would see them too.”

“So it was a race,” she said, “to see which of us could get here first.”

“Yep. And I won.”

Angel nodded. “You're pretty good,” she said. “But then, I knew that already. It would take somebody damned good to do what you've done. Like hijacking that drone.”

Chapel felt his jaw fall open.

He'd thought that Angel was just stalling, trying to put off her death as long as she could. Now he understood. She had a plan.

She was going to talk her way out of this.

NORTHWEST OF MOREHEAD, KY: MARCH 25, 01:36

“I mean, that would have taken some serious skills,” Angel went on. “It wasn't as easy as just, I don't know, calling in an air strike. You had to make it look good. Like a terrorist did it. But what kind of terrorist could do all that? You needed to break the encryption on the command signal. You needed to work the duty logs to make sure there even was a Predator over New Orleans that day. And you really needed to be on top of your game to know about that shipment of low-­level radioactive waste. I mean, it had a falsified bill of lading, right? It was contraband. But somehow you knew exactly where it would be, and when.”

“I work for the NSA. We know lots of things.”

Angel nodded. “You knew what was inside that cargo container. You knew the havoc it would cause if it was blown up in the right place. You got it right where you wanted. Did you hack into some kind of shipping database and change some numbers, make sure it ended up in New Or­leans on the right day?”

“I'm not a hacker,” Moulton told her, his voice rising nearly an octave in pitch. Chapel remembered what had happened when he'd called Moulton a hacker back at NSA headquarters. “I'm an analyst. Anyone can break into a database and fudge entries until they create chaos. It takes a real talent to read the numbers, to see the opportunities in what's already there.”

“So it was you,” Angel said. “You're the hijacker.”

Chapel looked not at Moulton but at Wilkes. He knew that he was the one Angel was really talking to. Somehow the assassin had been seconded to the NSA, turned against his former colleagues from the DIA. But if he knew what Moulton and Charlotte Holman really were, if he understood that they were the terrorists, the real culprits—­maybe he would stop this, right here. If they could just convince Wilkes—­

“Go ahead and say it,” Wilkes told Moulton.

Moulton looked like he really wanted to rub his hands together. To laugh maniacally. Instead, he visibly forced himself to stay calm. “Yes, that's right. I hijacked the Predator. I'm also the one who blew up your trailer, and the one who wrecked the California power grid. I've got other projects, too, ones that haven't started yet.”

“Dear God, why?” Julia asked.

He turned to look at her. “There are some things you don't even tell dead ­people.”

“Wilkes,” Chapel said, “you heard him, he's a terrorist. He's going to bring the whole country down if you don't stop him. If you don't—­”

“Oh, come on,” Moulton said. “You haven't figured it out by now? First Lieutenant Wilkes works for us. He always has. He was instrumental in our plan to destroy Hollingshead's directorate. I know you thought he was one of yours, but that's just because we wanted you to think that. He's a double agent.”

NORTHWEST OF MOREHEAD, KY: MARCH 25, 01:42

“Okay. Enough,” Moulton said. “I know you're trying to flatter me with all these questions. It's not going to work. It's time for the three of you to go.” He turned to Wilkes. He mimed firing a pistol with his hand.

Wilkes lifted his silenced pistol. But he didn't fire, not right away. “Huh,” he said.

“Is there a problem?” Moulton asked.

“I'm just wondering. I mean, I thought Angel was a computer. Now we know she's flesh and blood. You sure you don't want to take her back to Fort Meade for questioning? She might know something. And what about Taggart there? She's a civilian.”

Moulton looked very confused. “When we brought you on, we were told you were a team player. That you followed orders without question.”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, you want me to shoot, I shoot,” Wilkes said.

“So shoot, already.”

Wilkes nodded. He lifted the pistol again. “Okay. Just one thing. Triple.”

Moulton's look of confusion didn't change. “What?” he asked.

“I'm a triple agent,” Wilkes said.

And then he shot Paul Moulton through the head.

 

INDIAN SPRINGS, NV: MARCH 25, 23:19

When the secretary of defense landed on your airstrip late at night, you didn't tell him to come back in the morning.

Creech Air Force Base in Nevada didn't look like much on the ground. Just a standard prefab building like a million others the military owned. The decrepit casino next door, with its flashing lights and the jangle of its slot machines, made the base almost invisible in the desert night.

Quite intentional, of course.

Patrick Norton and a small entourage of hangers-­on were moved quickly inside and down a corridor lined with doors that were identified only by a series of numbers: GCS-­1, GCS-­2, and so on. The local base commanding officer, a colonel by rank, was kind enough to show them one of the rooms, since everyone in the group had security clearance. Inside each GCS, or ground control station, stood a tall server rack humming away and a tiny cubicle filled with flat-screen monitors. There were three chairs sitting in front of the desk. “Typically a flight is crewed by a pilot—­the stick jockey,” each colonel said, with that conspiratorial grin military men got when they use jargon, “an aircraft sensor operator who mans the controls for the aircraft's instruments—­the sensor—­and a flight supervisor who can make mission decisions in real time—­the screener.”

Taking up a prime amount of desk space was a big, complicated joystick mounted in front of the monitor. The stick belonging to the proverbial stick jockey. It was considerably more advanced than most video-­game joysticks, but it had fewer buttons—­just one, in fact, an orange key located where the jockey wouldn't accidentally brush against it.

“From this station,” the colonel went on, “we can carry out executive-­level missions anywhere in the world. All flight data and telemetry is carried over dedicated satellite links, allowing our ­people precision control with a minimum of lag time, while the draw rate on our imaging systems is—­”

Norton inhaled sharply and the man shut up. “Do you know why we're here?” he asked. “I mean, specifically.”

The colonel turned red. No military man liked being forced to guess what his superiors wanted, though it was hardly a rare occurrence. “Mr. Secretary,” he replied, “I'm assuming this has to do with the recent drone strikes on New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco.”

Norton fixed the man with his gaze. “That's right.”

The colonel looked into the middle distance. “Sir. It is true that approximately ninety percent of all UAV missions are flown out of this base, including all but a handful of combat missions in overseas operations. I can well imagine, sir, that you would be concerned about our security here.”

“I'm worried,” Norton said, “that the drones you have here on base, and all the drones you control out in the field, around the world, could be hijacked. Turned against their masters. Now. Tell me. Exactly how worried should I be?”

“Not worried at all, sir,” the colonel said. He was all but standing at attention. “It would be impossible for anyone to take control of one of my UAVs. Physically impossible. The GCS network is completely self-­contained. It does not connect to the public Internet on any level. Even the satellites we use to stream data to and from the UAVs are dedicated devices, meaning no one can access them except from a GCS. Whoever hijacked those other drones was using a public server to gain access. They hacked into drones that were cleared for civilian or at least nonmilitary use, either in law enforcement or civilian intelligence. That just can't happen here.”

“You're completely protected, then,” Norton said. “Fireproof.”

“Yes, sir, we—­”

“Excuse me,” someone said from the back of the entourage.

The colonel turned on his heel to look for the source of the interruption. “Ma'am? How can I help you?”

Charlotte Holman smiled and stepped forward. She held out one hand and waited until the colonel shook it. “This is very impressive security,” she said. “Very impressive indeed. But those of us in network intelligence really don't like it when ­people talk about one hundred percent security. I mean, there's always a way to get in, if you're persistent enough.”

“Not when you have an air gap like ours.”

Holman's smile just grew brighter. She'd hoped he would use that silly term. An air gap referred to a physical disconnect between one's servers and the wider Internet, a literal space of dead air between possible connections. An air gap was supposed to be even more secure than a firewall.

Holman had been working for the NSA long enough to know what words were worth. “An air gap that—­I'm sorry, I don't want to bring this up, but I have to. An air gap that failed to stop your system from picking up a keylogger virus back in 2011.”

The colonel's face went white. “That was a significant problem, yes, ma'am. A keylogger isn't particularly dangerous—­it wouldn't let anyone control the UAVs—­but we took it very seriously. And we've taken care of it one hundred percent. All our drives had to be erased and rebuilt from scratch, but we did it.”

“Did you ever find out how it happened? How you picked up that virus? How it crossed your air gap?”

The colonel chewed on his lower lip for a second. “Hard drives were being exchanged between ground control stations.”

“For what purpose?” Holman asked.

The colonel glanced at the secretary of defense, but Norton didn't offer him any chance to escape. “We needed to copy map updates and mission video between stations. The easiest and fastest way to do that was to move drives between servers. Unfortunately that meant the drives could leave the GCS rooms. One of them was connected to a public Internet server for a short time. The user in question didn't think he was exposing the drive to public access, but somehow the keylogger virus got onto the drive. When it was returned to the GCS, the virus spread very quickly through our entire system.”

“And why exactly was the drive connected to the Internet?”

The colonel stared down at his shiny shoes. “A stick jockey wanted to send video of a drone strike to his girlfriend. To impress her.”

“Did it work?” Norton asked. Behind him his entourage chuckled.

The colonel shook his head. “I couldn't comment on that, sir. I assume she was not impressed when he was court-­martialed and given a dishonorable discharge.”

Holman nodded. “But the point is, your air gap was subject to human error.”

“Not anymore,” the colonel said. He walked over to a server rack and pointed at the hard drives it contained. Each one was held down by a tiny padlock. “Hard drives can no longer be removed from a GCS. Under any circumstances. We learn from our mistakes.”

“Good,” Norton said. “That's what I needed to hear. We cannot afford to have even one more drone go rogue on us.” The entourage nodded and mumbled in agreement. “All right, Colonel. We've seen enough here. Now perhaps you'll be good enough to show us the Predators and Reapers you keep on base.”

“Certainly, sir,” the colonel said. He led the group out of the cramped GCS and back into the hallway.

Charlotte Holman was the last one out. Nobody noticed when she slipped a tiny black box out of her jacket pocket and stuck it to the back of the server rack. The box was no bigger than a matchbook, and it didn't have any blinking red lights on its surface, nor a tiny antenna, nor any other outward sign that would indicate it was capable of feeding information into the GCS servers through the keylogger virus.

The virus that, despite all appearances, was much more than just a harmless keylogger. The virus that, despite all the colonel's efforts, was still present on every hard drive in the air force base. The virus he was convinced they'd erased.

The virus that Paul Moulton had written for exactly this purpose.

“Let me just turn the lights off,” the colonel said as she stepped out into the hallway. He stuck his head into the GCS and took a quick look around, then flipped the light switch. Clearly he had no idea that his entire system had just been compromised.

NORTHWEST OF MOREHEAD, KY: MARCH 25, 03:06

The two of them worked in silence.

It took a long time to dig the grave. Chapel could barely bend over, the bandage around his midriff constricting every time he tried. Wilkes didn't seem to have his heart in the job, though he clearly didn't want Chapel to think he was a shirker.

It didn't help that neither of them had a shovel. There was a trowel in the tool bag Chapel had stolen from the motel, and Wilkes had turned up a hoe from an old outbuilding behind the mansion.

They worked side by side for an hour and at the end they had a hole about six feet long and four feet deep. Chapel took Moulton's legs and Wilkes took the dead man's shoulders and they got him inside without any fanfare. Chapel wondered for a moment if he should say something, offer up some prayer. Moulton had tried to destroy every part of his life, but still. You were supposed to respect the dead.

But then Wilkes started shoving dirt over the body, flecks of it collecting on Moulton's eyes and lips where they were still wet. Chapel looked away.

When the hole was filled in, they tamped down the loose earth as best they could. And then they just walked away.

Somebody would come. Someone from the NSA would come out here, probably as soon as they realized that Moulton had stopped reporting. They would come and they would probably find the shallow grave very quickly. Moulton would be dug back up and given a proper burial. Chapel had to believe that.

He scrubbed at his hands with a dry towel—­there was no running water in the decaying mansion—­and headed up the stairs. Wilkes followed right behind him. Up at the doors to the data center, Chapel turned and looked Wilkes right in the eye. Tried to stare him down. Make him falter.

It didn't work. Wilkes was a poker player. He didn't give anything away, not with his face.

Eventually, Chapel shook his head. He turned and opened the doors to the data center and stepped inside.

Angel sat at a workstation, paging through data on a big flat-screen monitor. Julia stood just behind her, one hand on Angel's shoulder. She turned to look at Chapel with a question in her eyes.

He didn't have anything remotely like an answer for her.

“Okay,” he said, not bothering to look at Wilkes. “Start talking.”

NORTHWEST OF MOREHEAD, KY: MARCH 25, 03:34

“It was three years ago that Hollingshead brought me in on this thing. I was back from my last tour, in Afghanistan. I guess you know by now what I am. My operational specialty.”

Chapel nodded, but said nothing.

“I got a call saying to go to such and such an office in the Pentagon. I went there and sat down and once he finished with all the song and dance, you know, cleaning his glasses, offering me a drink, all that stuff—­I asked him who he wanted me to kill.

“He smiled and said nobody. He said he had a different kind of problem, one he needed me to solve. I wasn't sure what he was talking about at first. I don't think, back then, that even he knew all the details. But he was worried.

“He's a man who knows how to keep his ears open, I'll give him that. Like any good spymaster, he keeps tabs on his opposite numbers—­all those directors and administrators and special deputies, at CIA and NSA and NGA and OICI and INR and all the other acronyms. He knows what they get up to, what operations they're running. I suppose he needs to know that so he doesn't end up stepping on their toes, like, by sending you out on a mission the CIA already has covered. There's a constant flow of information between the agencies.

“Thing is, not all this information comes from official channels. Some of it is just chatter. Rumors, call them, or stuff that got overheard when maybe it shouldn't have been. And back when this started, some of that chatter was starting to make Hollingshead very nervous. He had the sense that there were ­people in the intelligence community who were forming some kind of quiet alliance. A network with its own agenda, that crossed agency lines and didn't report to anybody officially. It was a network he was definitely not invited to join.

“Every time he tried to get close to the ­people in the network, they would shut down. Some of them were more blatant about it than others. It was clear they had orders not to give him so much as the time of day.

“He wasn't willing to use the word ‘conspiracy,' when he told me about it. He still thought maybe it was just some totally legit thing, a way for agencies to share information without having to call official meetings. But he needed to make sure. That was where I came in. He had my whole file, details on every one of my missions. He said he needed a poker player. Somebody with incredible patience, somebody who could hide his intentions as long as it took. Somebody who could think three moves ahead.

“He told me about you, Chapel, and why you wouldn't work for this assignment. He said you weren't a good enough actor. Your style was all wrong. He didn't want a commando, he wanted a sniper. He'd had Angel run through a bunch of personnel files, looking for the right man, and my name was the first one on the list.

“Which still didn't tell me exactly what he wanted me to do. Turned out the answer was simple: pretend I didn't like him.

“He made sure it looked like I had good reason. He talked to all the right ­people about how I was some kind of monster. How he'd recruited me because he didn't like the idea of a trained killer ending up at the wrong agency. He told ­people he had no real use for me and just wanted to keep me where I couldn't cause any trouble.

“My job was to make a little noise about how I felt like I was being treated unfairly. To spread some gossip about how I didn't want to work for Hollingshead anymore, that I was interested in transferring out of his directorate. I had some old friends from back in Iraq, civilian contractors from Blackwater, a CIA guy I knew, and we would get together and play cards sometimes. That was where I started hinting that I was unhappy.