White: A Novel (31 page)

Beechum pounded the table.
What else could happen?

“Tell them . . . tell them a certain number of files were ‘in transit’ from one depot to another at the time of the fire.” Which was true. “Tell them the army has already started looking into the matter but won’t have an answer for six to eight weeks. Tell them we’ve got a goddamned
real
crisis to worry about!”

No one in the room offered a better answer. She hadn’t expected any.

“Back to the real issue,” she said, turning away from what at this point seemed a minor distraction. The press secretary disappeared without a good-bye. “Here’s what I want to do.”

The cabinet members sat straight in their chairs. All good bureaucrats responded well to a motivated leader.

“I want a total lockdown on information coming out of this administration. Until further notice, all directives, information, and consultations originating from the Oval Office will be considered matters of national security. Understood? I will consider leaks of any kind a direct abrogation of your sworn duties. Make sure your people know I mean to prosecute.”

The cabinet nodded.

“Defense: I want the heads of CIA, DIA, NSA, National Imagery and Mapping, and all five branch intelligence agencies in my office . . . the Oval Office . . . by zero three hundred. They will bring individual readiness reports for all fifty-seven DoD installations in the affected areas and projections on collateral losses.”

The SECDEF wrote down her orders.

“State: I want you face to face with the Saudi ambassador. Explain our position without making threats. Wave some intelligence in his face so he knows what has us so wound up. Stress our history of cooperation and mutual respect. Stroke him just enough that he doesn’t panic.”

She turned to the secretary of energy.

“I want a realistic time line for restoring power, broken down by state, city, and population density, and I want a detailed briefing by zero-five on the time lines for crisis site decon. I’ll also need a damage assessment so we can figure out how much radioactive material might still be out there unaccounted for.”

Turning last with a scowl to the attorney general, she said, “As for Justice, I want Alred and DHS down the hall as soon as you can get them here. Make sure they know I want the head of FEMA, too. We’ve batted around the continuity of government protocols. I want concrete recommendations. Finally, I want to pull the trigger on that group in Columbus, Ohio. No more waiting. I want HRT to hit the place and find out what we are dealing with.”

Animated with the importance of matters at hand, the vice president stood up and leaned forward onto the conference table.

“I don’t have to tell you how important these coming hours will be,” she began. “It has been generations since this country faced a threat of this magnitude. I want you all to know . . .”

“Oh . . . my . . . God.” The secretary of defense scowled.

All eyes followed his to a man nearly stumbling into the room. Andrea Chase held him by the arm. He wore gray-and-white pajamas unbuttoned to the navel. His hair looked like a rat’s nest, his face a confused wriggle of stubble, worry lines, and rudely broken sleep. Only his navy blue robe bearing the seal of the President of the United States on the breast and flowing behind him gave up his identity.

“Somebody turn off that infernal music!” David Venable yelled out. “Turn off that music before I lose my mind!”

JORDAN MITCHELL MET
his richly appointed Bell Jet Ranger on the pad at Longpath. The moon had risen brilliantly in a clear winter sky, but he took no time to notice.

“You’ve scheduled the meeting?” he asked.

“Eleven o’clock tonight,” Trask answered. The chief of staff juggled two cell phones and a task list that would have challenged a Cirque du Soleil performer. He knew that Mitchell had purposely withheld any information about the meeting, but felt no slight. Trask worked at Jordan Mitchell’s pleasure. There were lots of things he didn’t care to know.

“Where’s Sirad?” Mitchell asked.

Mitchell buckled his seat belt as the pilot pulled up on the cyclical and pointed the nose south toward New York.

“At the Mind Lab. Still nothing concrete.”

“What about our friend GI Jane?”

The helicopter rose away from Longpath, up over Mount Greylock and the snow-draped playing fields of the Berkshire School.

“She took care of him about an hour ago. It’s still local DC news at this point. Everyone thinks it was an accident.”

Mitchell didn’t bother offering congratulations. He had never taken death as cause for celebration.

“What about that biotech company?” he asked, turning back to the prospectus he had been studying earlier in the day. Few minds more effectively compartmented matters of such disparate importance.

“They have agreed to our terms. General counsel is working up the contract. We’ll own them by this time next week.”

“Good,” Mitchell said, turning his attentions out the window. Things were finally starting to fall into place.

“Now, if we can just get a decent performance out of Waller.”

Mitchell stared down into a landscape of moon shadows on melting snow. Trask had been right about the dreamlike nature of his Berkshire retreat. Too bad this job had stolen his interest in dreams.

KHALID MUHAMMAD SMILED
broadly as the handsome Gulfstream private jet cleared the end of Guantánamo Bay’s main runway and banked left. They flew just a few seconds before Camp Delta appeared in his window. The bright lights, barbed wire, chain-link fence; the guards looked like toy soldiers in a shoe box from one thousand feet up, but then the plane flew into a maritime squall and, as if by Allah’s will, the interrogation center disappeared altogether.

The truth will set you free,
Khalid thought to himself, remembering one of the posters on the wall in the infirmary. Well, maybe.
Then again, lies had worked pretty well, too.

“Better sit down so you don’t hurt yourself, sir,” one of his fellow fliers cautioned. The man wore khakis and a safari vest like all the CIA people. It was a uniform they had adopted, trying to look worldly—like they really knew anything at all about Islam or what jihadists truly desired.

“Sir?” Khalid smiled cordially. “Five minutes off the ground and you call me sir? Amazing what a change of clothing will do, huh?”

A change of clothing, a change of attitude, a change of fortune.
The information he had provided moved with great speed up the bureaucratic ladder. Within two days he had received an offer from the director himself. After another day of negotiating, he had gotten his deal. In exchange for details about Saudi agents inside the United States, he would get first-class air travel to Khartoum. The only things between him and freedom were a debriefing at some “undisclosed location” and about eight thousand frequent-flier miles.

“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Muhammad?” the other passenger asked. He was a much bigger man with thick body hair that would have grown all the way up his face if he hadn’t shaved a big circle around his neck. The man looked Balkan, perhaps a Serb or Armenian. He sweated profusely.

“Yes, water.”

Khalid looked out his window again, wondering how long it would take to fly back home. He had come here blindfolded and bound to a stretcher in the back of some lumbering military transport. What a wretched trip that had been!

Allah huakbar,
he prayed beneath his breath. God had his own ways. How foolish for men to try to imagine where they fell within them.

“How high do you think we are?” the smaller man asked.

“I don’t know,” Khalid answered. “I’m no pilot.”

The clouds had parted now, but there was no land in sight. A turquoise Caribbean floor rolled out below them, close enough that he could see whitecap reminders of the squall they’d just flown through.

“Neither were those fifteen countrymen of yours,” the big man remarked, returning with Khalid’s water.

“Fifteen countrymen?” Khalid asked. He took the glass and shook his head. It occurred to him that the plane should have been gaining altitude, but he turned to the big man. “What fifteen countrymen?”

“The spineless assholes who learned how to fly without worrying much about the landing,” he said. “Remember them, Khalid?”

The smile was gone now. So was the
mister.

“I wouldn’t call men who gave their lives for their religion spineless,” Khalid said. “You may disagree with their cause, but you can’t argue their courage. Now how long before we arrive at this so-called undisclosed location?”

Neither American said anything. The smaller man stood and walked stoop-shouldered to the cockpit. He leaned his head in and said something, then returned.

“Better drink your water, asshole,” the man said.

Khalid thought about correcting the man’s language but saw no point in provoking him.

“Why drink my water? Are we there already?” Khalid asked. They had been flying no more than ten minutes.

“Short hop.” The little man nodded. He shuffled to the fuselage door. “You know, I always wanted to ask one of you guys about that whole doe-eyed virgin thing.”

“What?”

“Why you gotta have seventy-two of them when you die? I mean, you’re dead a long time, right, so sooner or later you’re gonna run outa virgins. Are you supposed to space ’em out over time or do you just get a nut every Wednesday night until you’re out of ’em and then spend the rest of eternity banging the same old pussy?”

You rude American dogs,
Khalid thought.
And you wonder why the rest of the world hates you?

“Camel got your tongue, asshole?” the little man said. He pointed to his partner, who walked over and grabbed Khalid by the throat. The Saudi struggled to free himself, but the ape man held him with little effort.

“Well, you’re gonna have plenty of time to figure it out,” the little man said. “Coming open!” he shouted up front. Khalid felt the engines roll back to idle.

The ape man dragged him out of his seat as the partner in the safari vest opened the cabin door. A rush of wind filled the unpressurized space.

“Welcome to the undisclosed location, asshole,” the big man said. “Mecca is that way.”

Khalid didn’t have time to look for directions. He was too busy falling.

“THERE IT IS
again.” Ravi pointed to what Sirad saw as a screen-sized paragraph of gibberish.

“Digital signature?” Sirad asked him. Hammer Time had calmed considerably after her last rebuke. He ogled her from time to time but made it less apparent.

“G-g-give the l-l-lady a Kewpie doll,” he said. Sirad hated watching a man pout.

“How can you tell?” she wanted to know.

“Time-stamping,” I Can’t Dunk explained. “Time-stamping is a feature of hash function, which allows us to precisely document when a communication occurred in the data stream. Remember the zero knowledge proof we talked about before? Well, Hammer Time figured out how to use what is known as the Feine-Fiat-Shemir protocol to match time stamp with point of origin.”

Ravi took over from there.

“Think of the Quantis data stream as a river of fluids flowing through a viaduct,” he said. “And let’s say this river contains effluent from hundreds of thousands of different tributaries, all uniquely stained with an identifying color. The river would look like a rainbow, but you could identify and track the source, destination, and volume of each current. Now, if you could also index the input time and color of each source, you could easily identify anything that stood out as an anomaly—something in the wrong place given when it entered the river and how it was supposed to move.”

“Each Quantis transmission is identifiable because we know the source and destination of each call,” Sirad deduced out loud.

“Exactly,” Ravi said. “So we simply waded around in the data stream until we found a current that didn’t fit.”

“That’s part of it,” I Can’t Dunk said. “That combined with some really confusing cryptanalysis mathematics.”

“Save it.”

“Right.”

Ravi pointed to another series of characters on the screen.

“Once we discovered our intruder, we swam back upstream, following his current. When we got to the source, we ran into a check valve of sorts—a security firewall. See?” he said excitedly. “That’s our intruder.”

“If you ran into a firewall, how do you know what’s behind it?” Sirad asked.

“Branding,” I Can’t Dunk explained. “There’s a designer vestige here that their gatekeeper either forgot to hide or didn’t think we were smart enough to figure out. It’s like seeing a Picasso on the wall. You don’t need a signature to know the artist.”

Sirad pointed to the data stream.

“That’s his digital signature?”

“Sure is, boss,” Ravi said. “May look like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to you, but to the three of us it might as well be a neon sign.”

“Plain and s-s-simple. Your mole is the president of the United g-g-goddamned States,” Hammer Time said proudly. “And his name is bobbing up and down in our s-s-system like a hooker’s p-p-panties.”

JEREMY TRIED TO
remain perfectly still as the fifth man reached out with the retractors and latched on to the tip of his left eyelid. The others in the circle moved closer, looking to see better in the muddy red light.

Phineas priests work on a system of leaderless resistance,
Jeremy remembered his instructors telling him.
Because of this lack of a central organization, they rely heavily on symbolism and doctrine; no meetings, no addresses, no communications, no organization. They rely on methodology and mission. The members anoint themselves.

The fifth man used the retractor to pull Jeremy’s eyelid out and away from the socket. He rolled the probe from his palm to his fingers, the blunt end forward.

Jeremy’s eyes darted nervously back and forth, searching for anything to focus on except for this hooded surgeon.

“
And when Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest saw it,
Jeremy recited to himself,
he rose up from among the congregation and took a javelin in his hand; and he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel.
”