BETA - Project Avatar, page 6
No, the most likely skeleton in my closet is the Indra project. And there’s only one living soul that I trust to tell me the truth about it.
Asking him meant a trip to Bangalore. As she nodded off, her head vibrating against the warm window of the bus, she had the comforting thought that Bangalore was also far, far from Arizona.
She woke at a traffic light in downtown Phoenix. As the bus negotiated its way to the station through light traffic she looked down the long, bleak boulevards, forming an endless orthogonal grid of broad asphalt strips between low, cheap-looking buildings under harsh desert sun: chain stores, real estate offices, fast-food outlets.
When they arrived, she slunk out of the bus station, half afraid she would be stopped by a plainclothes agent. But she turned a couple of corners without incident and vanished into the downtown shopping district.
The day was dry and mild, and a healthy crowd of Sunday shoppers swarmed the department stores. What I need is some fresh clothes and a disguise. This last thought lifted her flagging spirits. Imagine: she had become the kind of person who needed a disguise!
Right off the bat, she bought her first wig. The one she selected was long, black, and wavy. She had no idea how to put it on properly, but the floor clerk showed her all the tricks. Eyeing herself in the mirror, she wondered why she hadn’t done this before.
“Wow! You look like an Italian film star,” the floor clerk marveled.
Dee also selected a slinky white pantsuit with flared legs and a gold chain belt, then finished off her disguise with a heavy makeover, leaning toward a modest excess of mascara and eye shadow. Finally, a big pair of round sunglasses. Eyeing the full transformation in the mirror, she could agree with the sales clerk: she did look rather like an Italian film star, maybe one that was coming out of rehab.
By now she was running low on cash, but she bought a piece of fake alligator hand luggage. There was nothing to put in it but yesterday’s rumpled suit and a selection of toiletries picked up on the fly, but having a bag topped off the image and also made her look like a traveler.
In high spirits now, she stepped out onto the broad sidewalk and hailed a cab to the airport. Sky Harbor International Airport turned out to be right downtown, so in mere minutes she was wheeling her new alligator bag down the concourse, feeling completely transformed.
She bought a standby ticket for a Heathrow flight leaving in a couple of hours, with an Air India link to Bangalore, and she paid for the tickets with her credit card. If anyone was seriously pursuing her, she was leaving a trail, but she would have to show her passport anyway—that couldn’t be helped.
The security line was mercifully short. As soon as she was through it, Dee wheeled her half-empty carry-on toward the concourse internet café, where she could type her encrypted message into a console and send it winging its way to Abe’s dead drop. She also needed to recharge her electronics, but she had an in-flight adapter in her shoulder bag, so she could do that in the air. With an hour to spare, she took her time freshening up in the business-class lounge.
She strode confidently into the giant hallway of the international concourse. Everything is going to be just fine.
Chapter 7
The UMBRA operations center was located two hundred feet below the solid stone dome of Mount Hatchet, Arizona. Its warren of tunnels had been a missile command center during the Cold War. The command center was rendered obsolete by the START treaty in 1994 and turned over to the NSA in 1999 for clandestine operations.
Mount Hatchet Center was built on top of a vast array of hydraulics, allowing it to remain electronically operational even in a multi-megaton nuclear strike. The entire mountaintop was effectively mounted on springs. A direct nuclear hit might have created enough of a shock wave to kill all the people below, but the computers would have continued working and could have carried out a revenge launch all by themselves.
Brigadier General Tyrone Grimmer sat in the command chair of Hatchet Mountain’s decommissioned launch-control room. The chair was a huge leather wingback, elegant and comfortable, mounted on a swivel. The general could spin around and look, if he wanted, at the gigantic map of the world covering the curved wall behind him, embedded with thousands of lights to indicate potential missile paths over Russia and China. The lights were all unplugged now.
The general’s loyal aide, Major Gary Oliver, stood imposingly behind his right shoulder. Oliver’s midnight-red beret sat at an angle. Under it, half his face was varying shades of purple, black, and blue. It must have hurt a lot, but he showed no sign of noticing. His forearms, thick as hams, were folded across his chest as he watched the others in the room through bored, half-lidded eyes that never missed the slightest movement or facial nuance.
The general drained the last drops from his cocktail, then held out the empty glass to Oliver for a refill.
“When I think of the missions I’ve seen you pull off,” he growled hoarsely between his large teeth.
“Yes sir,” Bishop replied.
“How long have you led UMBRA’s elite team? It must be five years?”
“Five years next month, sir.”
Bishop and a soldier named Stoddard stood at attention, three paces in front of the general’s chair. The two men were both dressed in UMBRA berets and camouflage fatigues. Both wore a generous layer of desert dirt and could have used a shave.
“Remember Operation Sand Viper?” the general reminisced. “You brought me al-Rashad, single-handed—took him right out of downtown Mogadishu.”
“Yes sir.” Bishop gritted his teeth stoically. He was a man of medium build, made imposing by the granite cut of his jaw and cheekbones, and his sanguine complexion. He had fiery red hair and permanently windburned cheeks. His eyes were small and gray and tended to stare holes in things.
The general accepted the refill on his Rob Roy from Oliver’s huge hand and sampled it thoughtfully. “But now you can’t bring me a computer programmer? A civilian computer programmer—who’s wandering around somewhere on our own base?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
The general’s eyes swung with exaggerated incredulity back and forth between Bishop and Stoddard. Stoddard, a tall, lanky man with an aquiline nose and an Adam’s apple the size of a golf ball, swallowed nervously.
“Well, how do you explain that?”
“I can’t explain it, sir,” Bishop replied in a clear voice. “But that is the content of my report.”
“God damn it.”
The general turned his chair away in disgust and sipped broodingly at his drink. Down below the command dais, on the tile floor by the elevator bay, he could see the three erstwhile hijackers trying to stay out of the way. The tall, blond one, Holtz, was leaning with his elbows over the dais guardrail, watching the proceedings. The other two were playing ping-pong in the recreation area behind him, surrounded by the usual clutter of mortar tubes, sniper rifles, portable missiles, claymores, and rocket launchers.
The general swiveled back to face Bishop again. “I’ve left a message on Miss Lockwood’s cell phone ordering her to call me immediately, but I haven’t heard from her, so we have to assume she won’t make contact. We’d better extend the cordon,” he grumbled. “For all we know, she’s off the base by now.”
“Permission to speak, sir,” Bishop said stiffly.
“Say what’s on your mind, soldier. This isn’t a goddamn court-martial.”
“Sir, the subject has not left the base. No perimeter breach was detected last night or this morning.”
“Nothing’s impossible, Bishop. You of all people know that.”
“Sir, the subject has to cross a light beam at some point. Or trip one of the wires.”
“Hell’s bells, I don’t know, maybe she can fly! I’m not telling you to stop searching the base. Just get some of our people mobilized on a broader scale. Check the regional airports, train stations, all the usual. And call Fort Meade. Have them do a database check on her IDs, money transactions, electronic comms, the works. Priority Alpha.”
Bishop opened his mouth but hesitated a moment before speaking. “Confirmation, sir. Did you say Priority Alpha?”
“Affirmative,” said the general. He began cleaning a hairy ear with his fingertip. “This operation has been assigned Priority Alpha. Do you think I would’ve had you out there all night looking for this broad if it wasn’t important? I want her in custody within the next twenty-four hours, soldier.”
“Understood, sir.”
Holtz, still leaning over the guardrail at the edge of the command platform, cleared his throat. “Beg pardon, General,” he said.
“Go ahead,” the general said irritably, turning a bit in his chair. “You got something to add?”
“You’re never going to catch her that way. Not with the software she’s carrying.”
A snorting sound escaped Bishop’s nostrils, but a glance from the general silenced him.
The general swiveled to face Holtz. “Agent Holtz,” he said. “I have just ordered a full regional cordon operation, and a global real-time data sieve using the main database at NSA headquarters. And you’re telling me it won’t work?”
“That’s correct,” Holtz told him. His long, wolf-like face was cold and impassive. Behind him, the other two ex-hijackers had quit their ping-pong game. The broad-shouldered one with the black eye and the five-o’clock shadow was watching Holtz and the general carefully. The other one, slight-bodied and somehow squirrelly looking in his blue windbreaker, was glancing around the room. He held his paddle at belly height, moving it occasionally as if he expected an errant ping-pong ball to arrive at any moment.
Holtz said, “Once that woman gets the hang of the software she’s carrying, you’ll never see her again.”
“General,” Bishop interrupted, “she’s probably somewhere out on the hardpan right now. The chopper’s bound to pick her up sometime today. Frankly, if we don’t bring her in off the desert by tomorrow, she’ll probably be dead of exposure anyway.”
The general let him speak, then swung his eyes back to Holtz to hear his rejoinder.
Holtz said, “She’s definitely off the base by now, General. If you give me your three best men, I’ll lead a search-and-seize mission. I know how the software works, so if you keep us informed with real-time information from your link at Fort Meade, we’ll track down the subject and bring her to ground.”
The general pivoted back to Bishop and raised one eyebrow. But Bishop just stood at parade rest—he had already said his piece, and he was not a man inclined to extended arguments.
The general rubbed the bridge of his nose, between bushy gray eyebrows. “Agent Holtz,” he said, “repeat your disclosure.”
Holtz hesitated, shooting a quick glance back at his two men by the ping-pong table. “The whole thing?”
“Yeah, why not. Colonel Bishop missed the end of the interrogation—remember, he’s been out all night searching the base for a runaway cryptographer. So let’s have the whole thing again, in a nutshell.”
So Holtz repeated his story. As he did so, he kept his eyes on the general, not deigning to look at Bishop and Stoddard.
“Our unit has been officially defunct for one hundred eighteen days now,” Holtz said. “As I told you, we were basically a desk unit, classified R&D. Giacomo and I were the only ones with full field training.” He flicked a finger at the dark, broad-shouldered man by the ping-pong table. “Peszko is one of our programming eggheads.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the wiry little man, who gave a big merry smile at the sound of his name.
“Or was,” the general inserted.
Holtz shrugged and continued. “Our unit was operating under the direction of Dr. Bernstein, the well-known Nobel laureate in information theory. For six years, we had been working on Project Avatar. The software development was nearing the end of the development phase, and initial deployments were already scheduled. Then, on January 7 of this year, we were informed that the Miscellaneous Research Committee had removed Project Avatar’s funding from the federal budget. We were instructed to begin phase-out and cleanup activities immediately.”
“Goddamn candy-assed liberal Congress!” the general said.
“Precisely,” Holtz concurred. “As you know, the new budgetary guidelines require that all scrapped military research projects be assessed for civilian development potential. The committee ordered Project Avatar to be stripped down so that a harmless version of the software could be sold to commercial bidders, in order to recoup some of the costs.”
The general looked pointedly at Bishop. “Catch that?” he asked. “The reason the damn thing ended up on the open market is because Congress made them do it.”
“Traitors,” Bishop opined.
The word didn’t seem to surprise the general at all, but he shrugged without commitment. “Well, I can’t blame ’em for trying to make a buck off the thing. It’s the American way.” He turned back to Holtz. “But scrapping a project as important as yours—that was a bad call.”
Holtz and his two men nodded their agreement, and Holtz continued, “Under the terms of the phase-out plan, Dr. Bernstein had the programmers destroy all versions of the military operational code, leaving just one copy in deep storage at the Pentagon. I frankly admit it was at that point I began to act outside of orders and under my own initiative. From among the defunct research team, I recruited Giacomo and Peszko, and we salvaged the functional code by concealing it inside the new civilian version.”
“Permission to ask a question, General,” Bishop interrupted.
The old man glanced at him. “Go ahead,” he said. “This briefing is for your benefit.”
Bishop turned his eyes to Holtz for the first time. “I didn’t understand this part of your story last night, during the interrogation. You’re telling us you intentionally planted powerful, top secret military software into a commercial application package designated for sale in the civilian sector. What the hell was on your mind?”
Holtz glanced coldly at Bishop for just a moment, then let his eyes drift back to the general. “Phasing out a project like this takes years,” he said. “Sorting through all the code, double checks and confirmations, approvals, debugging, paperwork, followed by the whole bidding process. We’d seen it before, plenty of times. We anticipated a window of opportunity lasting at least two or three years, during which we could continue developing the military version on our own time. If we could have gotten it deployment-ready before a commercial sale went through, we felt sure the congressional committee would have reapproved Project Avatar retroactively.”
“Now, that’s initiative,” the general said, with a single firm nod. “You’re a credit to your nation, Holtz.” He sipped pensively at his drink. “But your plan never worked out.”
“I’m afraid not, General,” Holtz admitted. “This company, Endyne, stepped in and made a bid on the software right out of a clear blue sky. They must have received some kind of tip, and they were hell-bent to beat the competition to the bidding table. Less than three months into the phase-out, they made a huge offer, sight unseen. The approvals were rushed through, and the software was transferred into their possession practically overnight. That was on April first.”
“So they received the full, unauthorized military version?” Bishop demanded.
Reluctantly, Holtz turned his cold blue eyes over to Bishop again. “Well,” he said, “in principle, the militarized portions of the code are dormant.”
“In principle,” Bishop repeated. “But . . . what?”
“The application uses adaptive logic. It’s a learning program, and it can alter its own code execution. Given enough time, it will adapt to its new user environment, whatever that may be, and under some circumstances it will have access to all the embedded code.”
“Let’s wind up this summary,” the general said, looking at his watch.
“The three of us went AWOL immediately. We’ve spent the past month preparing an operation to squelch the code. We couldn’t afford to make any visible move against Endyne’s computers until we knew exactly where all the copies of the code were stored, and that involved a lot of hacking as well as intelligence work on the ground. As of Friday, two days ago, we were certain we knew the location of every copy of the software at Endyne. We had access codes and passwords for every one of Endyne’s computers by then, and we had checked their data logs, so we knew there were no stray copies of the code on CDs or flashdrives. So on Friday night we launched viruses onto all of Endyne’s hard drives to completely overwrite them, obliterating every copy of the Project Avatar software.”
“I assume you overlooked something then,” Bishop prompted him.
“Yeah,” Holtz confirmed in a neutral tone. “We downloaded the final version of all the data logs one last time, just before we uploaded the viruses. It turned out we had missed one copy. Just before seventeen hundred hours on Friday evening, Ed Haas, of Endyne’s software research department, had downloaded a complete copy of the code onto his laptop.”
Holtz looked at the general as he approached the awkward part of the story. “I’m sure you understand, General, our mission was severely compromised. We had to act quickly and with all means at our disposal.”
“Understood,” the general assured him.
“If Haas had learned he was holding the last remaining copy of the Project Avatar software, which was now going under the Endyne codename PAX 1.3 Beta, he would have made and distributed copies immediately. We would have lost control of the situation.”
“You responded to a serious breach of military security,” the general said.
“We spent that night preparing false identities and a cover story, and hacking into your computer to invite ourselves to your conference, in the guise of civilian contractors.”
“You’ll have to show my tech boys what you did,” the general mused. “I was told our computer was invulnerable to hacking.”
