The Fall (16 page)

“And I take it that he doesn't tell you how his day's been at the office?”

She shook her head. “The man's a vault, just like you and your top secret SEAL missions. Anyway, he lives just down the road in Melbourne, and he's probably in the best position to help us understand what happened to you. And as much as I hate saying this, Pete might also be able to help you … get back home.”

 

5

TIME AND DATA

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across electrified borders.

—Ronald Reagan

The skies over central Florida pulsated with sheet lightning, its stroboscopic flashes streaking across the boiling cloud base of tropical storm Claudette as it slowly lost its punch near Orlando. Winds at the Cape had reached thirty-five miles per hour, and forecasters predicted they would continue to increase, though nowhere near the punishing gale that had whipped Tampa eight hours ago.

Sitting in the back seat of Hastings's SUV, Pete watched the approaching storm while accompanying Hastings to a strip mall in nearby Melbourne, where his contacts in the NSA had not just pinpointed the location of Angela's mobile phone, but also had confirmed a credit card purchase at a drugstore.

Damn, Angela,
he thought.
I know you're smarter than that.

Wearing a finely pressed uniform, General Hastings sat across from him in the club-seating backseats of the large Suburban, quietly fingering his fancy encrypted phone, a tiny pair of reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose.

Captain Riggs and three of his men drove the SUV in front, leading the three-vehicle caravan speeding down I-95 while another SUV with four more soldiers covered the rear, which Pete could see clearly from his rear-facing seat. They rode in the center lane slightly above the speed limit, as allowed by highway traffic a bit heavy for this early evening hour, probably people escaping to the clear skies of the Miami area, which Claudette had missed completely.

“General?”

Hastings briefly lifted his bloodshot gaze from the glowing phone screen as thunder rumbled in the distance, before lifting an index finger while returning to his reading.

Like Pete, no one had slept much in the past thirty-six hours, putting everyone on edge, which only added tension to an already stressful situation. The general's scientists plus Pete's own team, had combed through everything from the moment Jack Taylor left the launchpad to his vanishing, and they had nothing.

Not one damn thing.

All of the existing science couldn't explain what had taken place in the ionosphere. The only clues were the strange set of telemetry numbers plus Jack's weird comment captured in the communications transcript as he'd punched through Mach three.

KSC, Phoenix. You guys see that purple haze around me?

Pete slowly shook his head. There was no such thing as a purple haze that high up, well before Jack reached any air ionization. But then again, nothing made any sense, including this damn military posse that the general personally led. Generals
never
led field operations
in
the field. That was the whole point of lower ranks, which did the dirty work while the top brass directed traffic from air-conditioned war rooms. Yet, Hastings refused to get his oversized ass and his entourage of expensive SUVs back on that C-17 military transport jet still parked at KSC's massive runway and return to Washington, even after his secured satellite phone kept ringing for the past day. Unfortunately for Pete, Hastings must have smelled his surveillance because after that call in his VIP office, the general had held the rest of his conversations, including those with his scientists, inside his SUV.

And when he wasn't talking, Hastings was constantly texting, eyes glued to that little phone, which probably held more answers than all of Project Phoenix's servers combined.

“General?” Pete insisted. “A word?”

“What is it, Flaherty?” Hastings replied, rubbing his tired eyes before looking at him.

“Sir, I'm just wondering again if it might be a good idea to contact the local authorities and bring them in on what we're doing.”

“Can't do that,” he said as lightning gleamed over the horizon, accompanied a few seconds later by muffled thunder. “This is a military operation and it's delicate enough as it is. The last thing we need is to bring in civilians. You of all people should know that.”

“But, sir,” Pete pressed on. “We got the NSA call ten minutes ago, and it'll be another ten before we get there. The local police could have secured the area for us already. I know them well, sir. They've been quite helpful in the past during NASA events.”

“Sorry, Flaherty.”

“I'm just worried about Melbourne PD, a county sheriff, or even a mall cop confusing Riggs and his team for something else. It could end badly sir.”

“Flaherty,” he said, removing his reading glasses and using them as a pointing device. “If you really want something to worry about, then worry about finding my fucking suit, and let
me
worry about securing Dr. Taylor. And
that's
an order.”

Hastings perched the glasses back on his nose and returned to fat-fingering his phone.

Secure her my ass,
he thought, by now pretty certain of the general's intentions if he'd ever got his hands on Angela. Besides, how could he be working the problem when Hastings had pretty much kidnapped him to come along? And besides, his Alamo scientists had already bailed from Mission Control, rushing off an hour ago in one of the SUVs to who-knew-where.

Pete looked out the window, expecting Hastings to have reacted the way he did, but doing his best to come across as cooperative in the hopes that the general might let him in on what was really going, so he could pass it along to Angela via their backdoor communications channel.

Though she never replied to my first warning message,
he thought, hoping like hell that she had received his last one, which he'd taken a huge risk sending right after the NSA reported picking up her mobile phone.

His eyes focused on the traffic behind them. No rain yet, but that would soon change as the storm continued its slow but steady march toward—

A biker approached the caravan from the right lane, single headlight cutting through the twilight of early evening, engine grumbling, washing out the distant thunder. Another biker came up from the other side, followed by three more, their mufflers deafening, even inside the SUV.

It all happened very fast. The biker on the right lane, a large man with a white goatee and a Stars-and-Stripes bandanna wearing faded jeans, an open denim vest, and dark sunglasses, throttled his Harley right up to the side of the SUV. His helmeted passenger, features hidden behind a tinted visor, turned in their direction while holding what looked like an oversized smartphone, its screen glowing.

Pete narrowed his gaze at the muscular biker, for a moment remembering Jack and Angela's wedding.

What was his name?

The passenger, whom he now realized was a woman, typed furiously on the phone with one hand while holding it steady with the other.

Angela?

She finished in a few seconds, tucking the phone inside her leather jacket and tapping the man's right shoulder, before tipping her helmet at Pete and giving him the biker wave.

The Harley roared, along with the ones on the other side of the SUV, leaping ahead, past Riggs's vehicle, squeezing in between two lanes of traffic, accelerating into the night.

“Crazy fucking bikers,” mumbled Hastings, flashing a glance at the departing motorcycles before returning to his texting or whatever he was doing.

I'll be damned,
Pete thought as the Harleys vanished from sight.

*   *   *

Angela removed her helmet and jumped off the Harley the moment Dago steered it into Pete's garage and parked it next to her Triumph and Art-Z's little scooter.

She quickly lowered the door before rushing inside the dining room, where they had set up their temporary base of operations twelve hours ago, after Pete had told her that Miami was compromised and urged her to hide here, also telling her about the extra key hidden in the back porch and giving her the passcode for his alarm system.

The rest of Dago's little gang from Paradise had made camp at a nearby motel to avoid bringing attention to Pete's house.

“Tell me it worked,” she said, snagging a Red Bull from the six-pack on the table, next to an open bag of Cheetos, before grabbing a chair and sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Art-Z and three laptops arranged in a semicircular pattern glowing with scripts.

She popped the lid and took a sip as the hacker pointed at the left one. “This little piggy got the data from the hijacked phone and it's parsing through it now. Hopefully we can find something useful to hack into DARPA. Now,
this
badass little piggy,” he added, index finger shifting to the center laptop, “will do the actual deed and has been configured to look like a server in the Solomon Islands with a further link to Geneva, pointing to the compromised tablet of the Wiltz woman, one of Hastings's scientists, sending them on a circular wild goose chase if they manage to follow the hack. And this little piggy, the meanest of them all, is filled with my finest brew, to be released when we're finished … my way of covering our tracks while sticking it to the big, bad wolf.”

“The good, the bad, and the ugly,” she said.

“They're all ugly, Bonnie. Ugly and mean. Don't try this shit at home.”

“Was it encrypted?”

Art-Z nodded.

“Did you break it?”

“
Please,
” he replied, eyes glued to the left screen. “One of these days The Man's gonna wake up and smell the coffee. Shitty salaries gets you shitty talent, which gets you shitty encryptions.”

“Watch it. NASA's part of the government.”

“Right,” Art-Z said. “And …
remind
me why we're here?”

Dago stepped into the dining room before Angela could reply. “Did it work?”

“Yeah,” she said, shooting the hacker a look before removing her jacket. “We'll know in a moment if Hastings kept anything useful in it.”

“What's this shit?” Dago said, pointing at the energy drinks.

“Fuel for the mind, man,” Art-Z replied.

“You didn't get any beer?”

Art-Z made a face. “Oops. Want some Cheetos?”

“Christ,” the biker replied, stomping away toward the kitchen. “Your NASA friend better have some in the fridge.”

“That didn't win you any points,” Angela said, watching the left laptop as the scripts scrubbed the sixty-four gigabytes of data in the phone's internal memory. It had only taken Art-Z thirty seconds to break through the encryption. In her prime, it would have probably taken her a couple of hours.

“I forgot,” Art-Z replied. “Besides, I never touch the stuff. Tastes like piss.”

“How do you know what piss tastes like?”

“Found some!” Dago proclaimed from the kitchen.

“Almost there,” Art-Z replied, pointing at the screen as Dago walked back in the dining room holding a longneck.

“Never figured you as the Corona type,” Art-Z said.

“That's funny. I
always
figured you as the little scooter man,” Dago replied, pulling up a chair and straddling it behind them while sipping his beer.

“Hello, little SIM,” Art-Z said, smiling, displaying the data on Hastings's SIM card, which was basically a small computer, complete with a processor, memory, and even its own operating system.

And that meant it could be hacked.

First thing he did was break into the encrypted EEPROM, the SIM card's electrically erasable and programmable read-only memory, basically a secured space where mobile payment apps could store their customer's sensitive banking data, primarily account numbers and routing numbers, plus log-in IDs and passwords.

It took his scripts ten seconds to break the Triple EDS encryption and another two seconds to download it.

“Here you go, Bonnie,” he said, running a finger across the touchpad of his laptop, shifting the file over to Angela, who started dissecting it in the middle laptop.

“What are you doing?” Dago asked Angela.

“Ripping into Hastings's personal life,” she replied.

“And you're next, Corona man,” Art-Z commented as he started to dissect the much larger flash memory of the phone, where everything else was stored, from applications to e-mail and text messages.

Angela pulled up the data file and began to deconstruct it, aligning user IDs with their respective passwords—at least those that the general had the laziness to keep in his phone for quick access instead of entering them each time. But she wasn't that surprised. Most high-security sites required very complex passwords, which were hard to memorize, encouraging users to let their devices remember them.

Which worked just fine for Angela. In another thirty seconds she had access to Hastings's bank accounts, at least the ones stored in this file. But she wasn't immediately interested in Hastings's financial data, nor did she care much about the water, gas, and electric bills for his Bethesda, Maryland, home—or even his monthly cable TV bill.

Angela quickly converged on a user ID connected to a set of three passwords, each thirty-two characters long to be entered in sequence at five-second intervals. A small script embedded in the file managed the process. And from the looks of it, Angela guessed this was the way Hastings had received the phone from his IT staff.

Interestingly enough, there was a fourth password, but it was not linked to the first three, making her guess that it would be required after logging into the system, where users would be kept in a bit of a holding room, like a cyber foyer, for a limited period of time—usually a few seconds—until they entered this final password and were allowed into the main house.