The Last Gasp, page 34
‘No home to go to, boy? No place to rest your weary head?’
Chase came back to himself and turned to face her. ‘Cheryl’s not back from her trip yet. She’s heading for an overnight in Hawaii and then onto Los Angeles. Two, three days and . . .’ He caught Micki’s expression. ‘Something up?’
‘Not sure yet, boss. Glad you’re still here though. Come see.’
He followed her through into the open-plan area with its rows of screens and softly humming consoles, skeins of multi-coloured cabling snaking across the floor. Most of the stations were unattended; just four people remained.
Micki leaned over the hunched shoulders of a black kid in a wrinkled T-shirt, peach-fuzz on his upper lip and chin. ‘Still gettin’ it, Jervis? Stronger or not?’
Jervis mumbled something which Chase didn’t catch, though evidently Micki understood. ‘Have you tried a wider sweep? It might be weak because it’s long distance, maybe. What you think?’
The kid was scanning three screens simultaneously. Each screen showed a solid block of numbers and symbols. Chase couldn’t have deciphered a single line if his son’s life depended on it. As he watched, Jervis did something with his thumb and the screens divided into four sectors, each one whizzing upwards so fast the digits blurred.
‘Jervis thinks we’re under cyber-attack,’ Micki said. ‘Or anyway, they’re probing around, searching for a weak spot. We’ve switched servers to see if Caliban is following us.’
‘Caliban?’
‘Jervis’s codename for the raider.’
‘How will Jervis know?’
‘Know what?’
‘If Caliban is trying to attack or . . . what’s the buzzword? Penetrate.’
Micki slowly doubled over, hugging herself. She was biting her lip and there were tears in her eyes. ‘Infiltrate.’
‘Yeah. I get it. Highly amusing, Ms Vargas. I knew it was a phallic reference of some description.’
When Micki had partially recovered, still dabbing her eyes, she explained to him that Jervis was playing Caliban as an expert fly-fisherman plays and feints a catch; the difference was that it was two fly-fishermen, and they were both experts, both cunning, each one as devious and wily as the other.
‘Okay,’ Chase said, ‘I see that. Nice analogy. But if and when Jervis locates Caliban, can he identify the person or organisation that’s making these attacks? NSA? CIA?’
‘Or it could be Fut/COE I guess – Future Crisis Operations Executive.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘They used to be called ASP – changed their name for some reason.’
‘I’ve heard of them all right,’ Chase said. ‘And I’ve met the guy who ran the outfit.’
‘You know that douche-bag Colonel Malden?’
‘I met him, can’t say I knew him. But he was a lieutenant then.’ Chase was astonished. Not so much that Malden was alive and breathing, but that he hadn’t advanced further up the greasy pole than a lowly colonel.
‘How’d you meet such an evil twat as him?’
‘I used to move in better social circles. I’ll tell you about it someday.’ Chase was worried and impatient: he gestured to the screens and the whizzing digits. ‘If Caliban breaks into our system could he identify our location – the business park, I mean, specifically this building?’
‘It would narrow the search to a region or possibly a city,’ Micki said. ‘That’s as close as he could get. No fear a detachment of marines is going to come busting in through the window any time soon.’
‘You think it’s a government probe? Or military?’
‘We won’t know unless Jervis can isolate and identify Caliban before Caliban does the same to us. All depends who’s fastest on the trigger.’
Chase wasn’t reassured. ‘Not only who, but why is the question. Are they trying to block us or just searching for information?’
‘There’s another possibility.’
‘Which is?’
‘They’re attempting to infect the system without us knowing it.’
‘With a virus?’
Micki nodded. ‘If they’re very smart and have the latest tech they could lurk in there, snug as a bug, steal our codes, monitor our traffic, see and hear everything that goes in, out, or through. Now you’re on a safe bet the Seals would come busting in through the window.’
‘Hell’s bells,’ Chase said softly. ‘That would be end-game.’
‘Set and match.’
‘We’d better hope Jervis’s quick on the trigger then.’
‘He’s the fastest draw in Deadwood,’ Micki said.
Chase jerked his thumb towards the kid hunched over, eyes flicking from screen to screen, and mouthed, How old is he? and when Micki answered Fourteen, Chase rolled his eyes to heaven. He said aloud, ‘How long will it take, tracking Caliban to his lair?’
‘Ten minutes,’ Micki said.
‘Oh . . . right!’
‘Or ten hours.’
‘Ah . . . you mean all night.’
‘And another ten on top of that – maybe. We just don’t know, Gav.’
Chase looked at his watch. ‘What do we do? Hang around till morning?’
‘Not much point,’ Micki said. ‘We’re as much use here as a fart in a wind-tunnel. Listen, seeing as you’ve no home to go to, let me buy you a drink. The minute Jervis cracks it, he’ll get on the phone. We can always come back.’ She gave him a brilliant flashing smile. ‘What say, boss-man?’
Chase couldn’t see any flaw in having a drink with a beautiful woman whose company he enjoyed and who made him laugh. No harm in that, no harm at all.
While Micki went to collect her things he returned to his office and was locking the file cabinet when his phone buzzed on the desk. Seeing there was no caller listed he wasn’t going to answer, then changed his mind. The line was atrocious, like listening to a hailstorm. A man’s voice with a strong foreign accent asked to speak with Dr Gavin Chase. When Chase confirmed it, a woman came on, faint and distorted through the crackles, yet clearly distressed.
‘Gav, is that you? This is Ruth Brosnan. I’ve just picked up a message from Stella Inchcape. Binch has been arrested or detained, or something, I’m not sure. Stella doesn’t even know who by or what the reason is. It’s very confusing. She’s been trying to reach you but gets no reply. Gav, can you hear me? Gav—?’
4
Newly promoted intel/anal Howard Nevison wasn’t happy about his first assignment for AAAV on two counts.
One: tracking down some two-bit activist website leaking low-level classified material was way below his skill set and pay-grade. There must be thousands – hell, tens of thousands – of these anarchist shit-stirring sites such as Midnite-Net; as far as he could tell this one was no different, no more subversive or more of a threat than any of the others.
Howard was beginning to regret leaving his previous job at Black/PROP, which had been absorbing and challenging, for what he had mistakenly assumed was a step-up to Extreme Top Secret work of national importance.
Two: the prime-echelon Level Five files he’d been ploughing through for the past week made distinctly queasy reading, as far as he was concerned. He’d probably dug a little deeper than his brief required, or Chesney Poulton had anticipated. But the environmental activists dossier had piqued his curiosity as well as giving him a nasty jolt . . . 768 murdered or ‘disappeared’ in just two years! On top of which Howard had come across another cache of recent reports for Venezuela and Ecuador, listing more deaths and disappearances – 132 of them – which brought the grand total to a neatly rounded-off 900.
These were brutal and ugly facts it was hard to stomach: 900 people disposed of for protecting their land and rivers and lakes from encroachment and exploitation. The stark figures on the page didn’t paint a pretty picture.
And how many locals and native inhabitants had perished in the cause, too, not worth even the anonymous memorial of a number in a file . . .
‘Mr Nevison? Sir?’
Howard swivelled round from his workstation. The two Tech-Bots (as they were unflatteringly called, though never to their faces) were at an adjacent bench. It was their tedious task to do the mind-numbing graft, then feed the results to Howard.
The sub-basement of the AAAV building on K Street was the sweetest spot in the entire complex, thanks to the air-conditioning installed at vast expense to soothe and pamper the banks of computers, servers and quantum-memory grids, and stop them from going into a meltdown. Concern for the precious hardware came first, naturally, but their human slaves also gleaned the benefit of a fresh cool atmosphere.
‘What have you got?’
The jaws of the Tech-Bot who’d claimed his attention were moving like a cow’s chewing the cud on a wad of gum. It was slovenly and disrespectful, and Howard wasn’t amused.
‘That trace-route you wanted on Midnite-Net. At the latest count we’ve upwards of’ – the masticating Tech-Bot glanced back at the screen – ‘forty-one network paths involving at least twenty random servers located in as many countries from China through Uzbekistan to New Zealand to Argentina to—’
‘Anywhere near locating the geophysical host?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Is it Stateside?’
The Tech-Bot shrugged. ‘Couldn’t say.’
‘So your question is?’
The Tech-Bot swapped the wad to the other side of his mouth before answering. ‘Well, I guess . . . what d’ya want we should try next? This might take for ever. We could engage a proxy encryption search. Or check for a spoofing source maybe . . . ?’
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a response, and when none came, glanced across to his colleague. Howard saw they were both making an effort to keep a straight face.
‘Unless it’s in the DarkNet,’ the other Tech-Bot chimed in, pinching his nose hard to stifle his sniggering.
Plain what they were up to: the age-old game of using geek jargon to demonstrate their superior technical expertise.
‘What do you suggest we do?’
The Tech-Bot paused, chewing sloppily with his mouth half-open. ‘I guess it’s your call,’ he said, staring at Howard. ‘Sir.’
‘Don’t you know what you need to do?’
The Tech-Bot grinned. ‘Sure.’
‘Well, in that case,’ Howard said in a sweet and reasonable tone, ‘I suggest you stop jerking off and fucking get down to it, unless you want to pull a 48-hour load this weekend including a double night-shift.’
The second Tech-Bot was nettled. ‘The primary source keeps re-routing through all these domains. Every time we get close he gives us the finger and he’s gone.’
‘Is that the answer you’d like me to take to the director-in-chief?’ Howard was mad because he was the one who’d carry the can if they failed to deliver; and Poulton wasn’t the understanding type. ‘You’ve got state-of-the-art global surveillance sweep and enough computing power to fly us to Mars and back. What do I tell him? You couldn’t find your ass in a darkened room with a flashlight?’
The Tech-Bots swivelled their chairs and went back to work, one of them muttering something with a lot of hard consonants.
Howard let it go. Eyes on the screen, he took a swig of root beer from a cardboard cup while he perused the Level Five database. It crossed his mind to wonder if the Tech-Bots had clearance for this material. Maybe he shouldn’t even be looking at it with them in the same room. Much of what he read was deeply strange stuff for an organisation such as the Alliance for the Advancement of American Values to be involved in; there was almost a quasi-religious ring to it.
For instance, a lot of communication between the director-in-chief and the Church of Charmed Baptist Brethren at McLean, north of DC. Money transfers were mentioned – some of the sums were eye-watering, in the tens of millions of dollars – flowing from AAAV into church coffers. The source of all this cash was a mystery. Most of it, as far as Howard could make out, came from somewhere in the Middle East and from there found its way into various foundations and trusts based in the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. The AAAV had bank accounts in both places and it was a simple matter to transfer the money – maybe as simple as walking across the street with a suitcase stuffed with $100 bills from one bank to the other.
The real screwy thing was why a religious institution should receive financial support in the first place. The aim and purpose of the AAAV, as its name proclaimed, was to spread the American ideals of freedom and democracy and justice to the rest of the globe, not to evangelise for a particular creed.
None of this had anything to do with his assignment, but Howard couldn’t help being both puzzled and intrigued; his curiosity was aroused, and he wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery. He swiped the screen and followed a link to open a sub-menu. Evidently he’d crossed a no-go line because the screen went black. Then up popped a caption:
SECURITY CODE REQUIRED:
CBF/90081-12-074
Fortunately he had clearance and been vouchsafed the cyphers. Howard punched in the appropriate pass-code from a list in his pocket and was granted access. The first item from the new menu that caught his eye read: MOG. He opened the file to learn that MOG stood for ‘Messengers of God’ and that it was a group affiliated with the Charmed Baptists . . . back on the religious kick again!
Why information on a religious group should require Level Five security clearance baffled him. What was buried down here, the secrets of the Holy Grail?
The deeper he went into it, the less Howard felt he understood. There were jargon words and arcane phrases he couldn’t make sense of, such as ‘Ascendancy Status (To Be Confirmed)’. He clicked open the file to find a list of about twenty names. One name sprang out at him.
Professor Gerald Lautner.
This could be no other than Gerry Lautner, who held the chair of humanities and ethics at MIT, the academic Howard revered above all others. In his final two years there, Howard had forged a close bond of friendship with Gerry, who might have been in his early fifties, but had the same outlook and verve of a guy thirty years younger. Howard thought of him almost as he might an older brother.
Ascendancy Status? What the fuck was that all about? Ascending where?
If there was an answer to that question, Howard couldn’t find it. Hardly surprising with the vast amount of data in the classified cache. He could sit here 24/7 for the next six months and be no nearer.
But none of this was helping resolve the assignment Poulton had handed him. The lack of progress was making Howard anxious. If the Tech-Bots were hopelessly blocked in effecting a trace, there had to be other means of achieving it, other avenues to explore. Feeling frustrated, he shut down the Level Five programme and spent the next hour or so sifting through the Climate Alert blogs Midnite-Net had been issuing over the previous two years. You only had to read a handful of alerts before realising why major international corporations hated the Midnite crowd like poison. The information they’d leaked and made public on the numbers of environmental activists murdered or ‘disappeared’ was pretty tame compared to the revelations about the secret polluting record and illegal exploitation of natural resources by oil and gas companies, mining syndicates, chemical companies and pharmaceutical giants – aided by the willing collusion of politicians of every stripe.
If there was a theme running through all Midnite activity it was focusing awareness on the degradation and despoilment of the natural world: who was causing the damage and what the long-term effects might be.
This was confirmed by an info-chart Howard found on their site that summed up many of their concerns. It was titled ‘Oxygen Balance Sheet: Profit & Loss’ and showed in simple diagrammatic form the strains the planet’s oxygen budget was under from the progress of civilisation. Howard had no idea if the science behind it was accurate or exaggerated, credible or far-fetched. But he could understand why the Alliance for the Advancement of American Values would see it as dangerous, subversive propaganda, its message a threat to the national interests.
The Tech-Bot with the sloppy chewing habit broke Howard’s thread of concentration by cursing under his breath.
Howard took a sip of root beer and asked, not expecting any miracles, what he’d found.
‘Not a fuckin’ thing – they’ve found us, the sneaky bastards!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ve deployed an anti-probe screen and they know we’re operating a trace-route search for their signal ID.’ He was shaking his head in bafflement. ‘Would you believe it? They’ve actually designated us a codename!’ He wrote something down on his pad.
‘When you say “found us”, can they identify who we are?’ Howard asked, his anxiety rising.
‘No, we’re too well protected. They just know there’s A Prowler out there . . . unidentified.’ The Tech-Bot picked up his pad and frowned at it. ‘Our prowler tag, for your information, is “Caliban”. Whatever the fuck that means.’
‘It’s from The Tempest,’ Howard said. He turned back to his own bank of screens, almost in despair. Just what in hell would he have to put in his report to the director-in-chief in twenty-four hours’ time that wouldn’t make Chesney Poulton bite so hard on his Cuban cigar that it exploded? Nothing, except the wonderful news that his hunters had just become the hunted.
5
Probably the worse thing was not knowing if it was day or night. Night or day. The result of being hooded while on the move. Time soon lost its meaning. Hands pinioned in plastic bracelets, ankles constrained in chain-linked shackles.
Binch knew it had been early morning when they picked him up, but blindness, movement, being roughly transferred from a vehicle to an aircraft, still hooded, then hours in the air made everything a meaningless blur. The shock he felt didn’t help: the suddenness of his arrest, this claustrophobic dense blackness in which it was difficult to breathe, the rough material tightly enclosing his head, all contributed to a rising sense of panic making his heart beat madly.
