The octagonal office in the centre of the CDD control centre had been known as the swamp ever since the centre was established, and nobody really knew why.
The first inhabitant, a college professor, balding on top but with long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, had been known as “The Thing from the Swamp” by the CDD team.
He had been followed by “Swamp Creature”, “Swampy”, and most recently by “Swamp Witch”.
Small, rotund and with a shock of bright orange hair, the name seemed to suit, and although Isabel Donald knew full well of her nickname, the current on-site representative of the Congressional Oversight Committee never complained.
Her references were impeccable, her rise through the ranks of the CIA’s IT department remarkable, and her abilities quite unique.
All in all there was no reason to suspect that she could be actively working against the CDD from the inside.
No reason at all, Sam thought.
“Here,” Dodge said, tapping the screen of his laptop.
Dodge’s room at the Crowne Plaza was identical to Sam’s in every luxurious way, although a lot less tidy. Sam yawned and tried to focus his eyes. He had slept very little on the Airbus on the way to Chicago and not at all on the way back.
“Here’s Swamp Witch,” Dodge said, “appearing behind you and telling Vienna to pull her head in.”
“That’s not quite what she said,” Sam said.
Dodge ignored him. “Right, switch to the overhead camera and we should see where she appeared from.”
The data from six different video cameras had been copied onto a memory stick and plugged into the USB3 slot of Sam’s laptop. All of the CDD team could be easily identified, intensely working away at their workstations until one by one they threw their hands in the air, giving up as their computers died with the horrible blue screen of death. They congregated behind Dodge and Sam, or Socks and Zombie.
“And we find out about the plane … here,” Dodge said.
The sudden movement and look of panic was unmistakable. Sam felt his palms begin to sweat, just watching the video.
But as far as Sam could see, none of them left the room. No one accessed a computer. No one had the opportunity to hit any kind of self-destruct button on the intruder code.
Except for Swamp Witch. The keeper of the gates. The watcher of the watchers. The guardian of the truth. She was nowhere in sight.
“She stays in her office right up till the last minute,” Sam said, running the video forwards and backwards as Swamp Witch emerged and scampered down the slight slope towards their workstations. “Maybe she was just fighting them, the same as we were. Came out when her machine got wiped, like the rest.”
“Or maybe not,” Dodge said.
“You can’t really think that she is our insider,” Sam said. “She has security clearance that goes beyond the moon.”
“Don’t mean nothing,” Dodge said. “Maybe she’s just pulled the wool over a lot of people’s eyes for a long time.”
“It still doesn’t feel right to me,” Sam said.
“Give me a better option,” Dodge said.
Sam couldn’t. He shrugged. “Now what?”
“We need some proof,” Dodge said. “We can’t just go accusing the Oversight rep of treason without something a bit stronger than this. I think we need to get into her computer.”
“You mean hack in?”
“Nah, ya muppet, you think she wouldn’t notice that? We need to get into the swamp when she’s not around and clone her hard drive. Then we can analyse it at our leisure back here.”
“Security cams would see us,” Sam said cautiously.
“Yeah, but nobody reviews the footage unless there is a problem,” Dodge said. “So let’s not cause a problem.”
“I think we should let Jaggard know,” Sam said. “That way, if we’re caught, at least one person will know what we were doing.”
“If we ask Jaggard, he’ll say no. If we then go and do it, we’ll be out on our arses,” Dodge said.
“Probably be out on our ‘arses’ anyway,” Sam said.
“Maybe,” Dodge said. “But it’s always easier to apologise later than to ask for permission up-front.”
“When?” Sam asked.
“Sooner the better,” Dodge said. “How about tomorrow? If you can cover me, I’ll try and slip into her office when she’s not there.”
“Won’t it be locked?” Sam asked.
“That will be the least of our worries,” Dodge said.
“Any progress?” Jaggard asked, and his tone was not chirpy. He leaned forward on his elbows, staring across the desk at Sam and Dodge. He had called them into his office the moment they arrived at work.
“Nothing yet,” Dodge answered for them. “We put the terrorists’ hard drives through every kind of test, including spectro-magnetic analysis and we got nothing. They’re as clean as the day they were manufactured.”
“Is it possible that someone replaced the drives?”
Dodge shook his head. “Forensic examination of the screws and the cable ends says no. These are the original drives. They have just been zeroed.”
Jaggard nodded. “That pretty much describes their owners as well. Zeroed.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked. “What’s wrong with them?”
“We’re not yet sure,” Jaggard answered. “They are both in a deep coma. Looks like a massive brain aneurysm. The problem is that the CAT scans don’t show any evidence of it. Whoever did this to them has access to drugs or some kind of radiation equipment that we can’t begin to imagine.”
“Would the CIA have that kind of stuff?” Dodge asked.
“I don’t know,” Jaggard said. “You want to run over there and ask them?”
“What about the neuro-headsets?” Sam asked. “Any chance you could induce some kind of brainwave that could cause this kind of damage?”
“First thing we thought of,” Jaggard said. “Had experts running tests on them all day. Worst they’ve come up with so far is to induce a mild headache by overloading the audio channels.”
“So they’re safe?” Dodge asked.
“Better be,” Jaggard said, “considering the Oversight Committee has taken Swamp Witch’s advice and is insisting that we start training on neuro, effective immediately.”
“Cool!” Sam couldn’t help blurting it out.
“You won’t be so happy when your brain explodes,” Dodge said.
“We’ll all be on them,” Jaggard said. “Here and at Cheyenne. We’re not going to get caught out again.”
Jaggard pushed a copy of the local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, across the desk to Sam.
“You heard about this spam thing?”
Dodge nodded, but Sam shook his head.
“Happened while you were in Chicago.”
“SPAM CANNED” was the newspaper headline.
Sam scanned the article quickly. Apparently, a gradual reduction in the amount of spam around the world had turned suddenly into a full-blown collapse.
“Spam servers around the world have been targeted and shut down,” Jaggard said. “I want you on it. Find out who’s behind the attacks.”
“Who cares?” Dodge said with a laugh. “They’re spammers. Let ’em burn.”
“The day before it was online gaming sites,” Jaggard said.
“You think the attacks are related?” Sam asked.
“Possibly, probably, who knows?” Jaggard said. “What I want to know is what’s next? What are they planning for tomorrow? As long as they’re doing good deeds then nobody really cares. But what defines good? As they – whoever ‘they’ are – see it. What if they decided at election time that they didn’t like one particular candidate, would they crash all the support websites? Worse, would they hack the election software and rig the election?”
“Now you’re giving me ideas,” Dodge said.
Jaggard ignored him. “And I especially want to know whether it’s related to the Chicago terrorists.”
“What makes you think that?” Sam said.
“I don’t know. Maybe just the timing,” Jaggard replied. “We have three separate incidents occurring within three days, and in each case we have no idea how it happened, or who did it. Vienna and Kiwi are already looking into the gaming sites. I want you two on the spammers. If there is a link to the terrorists, or that ‘phantom’, then I want to know asap.”
“On to it, guv,” Dodge said, and they both got up to leave.
“Stay for a moment, Sam,” Jaggard said.
Sam sat back down slowly.
Jaggard waited until Dodge had left then said, “I need to talk to you.”
“Is it my probation?” Sam asked.
Jaggard shook his head. “That’s not going to be a problem. We need you around.”
Sam said nothing, looking closely at Jaggard. He kept his face emotionless, although inside him a warm surge of pride was competing with a sudden, inexplicable fear.
“Your mother has been in contact,” Jaggard said. “A message relayed by the authorities in New York.”
“Is she all right?” Sam asked, the fear growing rapidly.
“She’s fine,” Jaggard said. “It’s not about her. It concerns a Derek Fargas.”
“Fargas?” Sam mentally kicked himself. He had meant to get in touch with Fargas, but hadn’t yet got around to it. The business with the terrorists and the phantom had simply got in the way. Fargas would understand though. Surely? Once Sam was able to explain.
“How well did you know him?” Jaggard asked.
Sam opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again quickly.
Jaggard hadn’t said, “How well do you know him?”
He’d said “did”.
When Sam arrived at his desk, his new CDD-issue neuro-headset was sitting in a plain cardboard box next to his keyboard. He sat and just stared at it for a while. The headsets were the thin rubber-coated wire mesh style that they had used in Chicago. Looking closely at it he saw it was a Neuro-Sensor Pro 3.1. A big step forward from the 1.2-version headset he had scored from Telecomerica. Glancing around, Sam saw that about half of the team was already wearing them.
Bashful and Gummi Bear, to his left, were staring at nothing with their eyes shut and laughing their heads off over some shared private joke. Socks was wearing his, although Zombie seemed to be having difficulty with the shape of his and kept taking it off, making small adjustments to the wires and putting it back on.
“Are you all right?” Dodge asked.
“I’m okay,” Sam said, but he wasn’t okay. The news about Fargas felt like a kick in the chest, a crushing, winding blow. Was he responsible for what had happened?
“You look pale,” Dodge said.
“It’s nothing,” Sam said. “Let’s get on with it.”
They spent most of the shift digging around in the dark alleyways of the internet, where the gamers, spammers, scammers and phishers lived.
Places they expected to find full of seedy little servers and malformed code were empty. The dingy bars and backstreets were deserted.
It was as if the barnacles on the dark underbelly of the internet had been scraped off.
What did it; who did it; how they did it; were questions without answers.
Fargas intruded constantly on his thoughts, and several times he found himself blinking back tears. Once he caught Dodge looking at him strangely, but Dodge said nothing, which suited Sam just fine.
Sam kept an eye on his watch as the afternoon progressed, ever conscious of the time. Dodge was casual about it, but breaking into the office of the Oversight rep was no laughing matter. If caught, he could end up back in Recton. Or worse.
He needn’t have worried.
Just after 3.30, with the shadows from the windows starting to spread long grey fingers across the room, there was a paralysing scream from the centre of the room.
“What the …?” Dodge began.
The scream continued on and on, an ancient primordial sound that reeked of every kind of terror and black despair, then just as suddenly cut off.
“Get Jaggard,” Dodge said. “That came from the swamp.” He was already running up the slope to the central octagonal office.
Sam pressed the emergency alert button on his keyboard and ran after Dodge.
The door was locked, but before they could even think about finding someone with a keycard that would open it, the door opened by itself and something that used to be Swamp Witch staggered out.
She made just one tottering step before collapsing to her knees, then slumping over, twisting onto her back as she did so, half in and half out of the door.
Whatever it was inside her that had made that scream, was gone, vanished from her body as if it had never existed. Her face was calm and still. She looked up at Sam and Dodge with the cherubic questioning innocence of a newborn baby.