MY APPROVAL FOR CATEGORY 3 SPECIAL ACCESS CLEARANCE, THE highest there is, was authorized at midnight – just under eight hours ago – on Byford’s authority, and by the legal counsels of the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the CIA and the President’s Special Counsel. It is being rushed through to enable me to receive need-to-know intelligence on certain classified programs.
The lawyer behind the desk glances at me over the top of his glasses as he reads from the document. He is keen for me to understand the penalties for breaching a Special Access Program request form: a 150-year jail sentence and fines that would leave me with several lifetimes of debt.
The Office of National Intelligence is the access control authority for the SAPs I am being cleared to know about. When we’re done, I make my way across the lobby, as directed, toward a reinforced door where I see the Attorney General and the CIA Director deep in conversation.
I present my ID to a Marine. The watch team officer checks my name against a list, asks for my phone, tags it, secures it in a wooden locker, and asks me to follow him.
Like everything else in the ‘Sit Room’ complex, our destination is much smaller than the carefully staged publicity shots suggest. We access it through a door next to what looks like a darkened cubbyhole with video-conferencing facilities. The watch officer shows me to my assigned seat – not at the table, but against the wall to the right of the entrance.
The Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the FBI Director, the Vice President and the Homeland Security Secretary are already seated around the table – and so is Cabot, who smiles at me, briefly exposing his small white teeth. Christy stands behind a podium at the far end. I acknowledge her and she nods back as the Attorney General and the CIA Director take their seats.
The President and Reuben are the last to arrive. Thompson looks drawn. He mutters a greeting to no one in particular, from the head of the table. Reuben’s expression is grave. With ten days to go before Thompson’s State of the Union, his presidency is in crisis. The networks are still leading with extensive coverage of the shootings and their connection to the clearing of the Settlement and the North Fence camp eviction, which has resulted in multiple arrests overnight. The action is being widely reported as evidence of Thompson’s double standards: a man who talks a good game when it comes to freedom of speech, but not when it impacts his own security.
Byford hits the remote. Along the top of the cover slide, above the seal of the National Security Council, run the words: Top Secret – Special Access Required. Project Element.
‘We believe the deaths of Lefortz, Anders and Jimenez were linked to a serious cyber incursion; that a person, persons or agency unknown hacked into the MPD’s comms network and that somebody masquerading as Anders – or a piece of software able to mimic his voice – told his tac officer, Raoul Jimenez, to take the shot.’
The room falls quiet.
‘Efforts are being made to track back to the source of this incursion, as well as three others. In the first, a CCTV camera was repositioned to provide a view of the church from an office building across the street. In the second, a camera was disabled to allow the protester to make his way from the river to the Settlement, where he took refuge before making his way to St John’s. We know that he accessed the church through the sewer system.’
She pauses before continuing.
‘The most serious breach, however, involved the altering of DNA, medical and personnel records on the veterans register, prompting the MPD to wrongly identify the protester as former Marine Master Sergeant Matthew L. Voss.’
She takes a sip of water. ‘In the early hours of yesterday, the Secret Service was able to establish the protester’s true identity beyond doubt. Until then, he was thought to be on the run, AWOL, very likely deceased.
‘Night before last, we located a cabin in the North Laurel Fork, West Virginia, where he had been in hiding. Sergeant Duke Gapes – his real name, Mr President – was part of a covert effort involving our intel community at the highest levels.’
Cabot takes the podium and presents us with the cabin, floodlit, surrounded by cables. Tech support and forensics specialists obscure part of the shot, their white jumpsuits prominent against the trees.
‘Mr President, what we have uncovered is complex.’ He seems unusually pleased with himself, I guess because he can take credit for the breakthroughs of the past twenty-four hours and distance himself from anything that has gone wrong.
‘We don’t yet have a complete picture of where Gapes has been or what he’s done since he went to ground three years ago. Neither do we know why Voss – the man originally identified as the protester – was chosen to divert our attention.
‘It’s partly with these questions in mind that I’ve been working with Mayor Phillips to clear sources of protest in the so-called peace movement. We’re operating on the assumption that all this activity has been undertaken on the instruction of some foreign agency, but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility the threat comes from within.’
The slide show flicks to an overhead of the Settlement and a map overlay showing the distance to St John’s with dotted lines tracing Gapes’s subterranean route, and then on to the cabin’s interior.
Cabot acknowledges the murmur that greets the shot of the crazy wall. ‘I know. There are more than five thousand images. Some photos. Some drawings. Many have been pulled off of the Internet. Some come from a source that is particularly vexing, Mr President, because it tells us that Gapes had access to a source of surveillance imagery whose origins at this time are unknown.’
He beckons to the watch officer.
Hetta has also spent the morning getting cleared. She now makes her way across the room.
‘Mr President,’ Cabot says, ‘this is Special Agent Henrietta Hart of our Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division. Hart was with Colonel Cain when he was called to St John’s Church on Monday morning. Hart and Colonel Cain were also responsible for identifying Gapes and locating the cabin. She has been working on the data and has some early, critical analysis.’ He touches her lightly on the shoulder. ‘Go ahead.’
Hetta steps up to the lectern.
She touches her crucifix.
A section of the wall centered on the upside-down image fills the screen.
She flips it right side up and four rows of numbers appear:
17, 7, 21, 21, 6, 18, 21, 20, 25, 23, 21, 11, 20, 19, 11, 22
2, 11, 5, 7, 18, 25, 14, 14, 6, 11, 11
24, 21, 25, 8, 6, 8, 5, 21, 20, 25, 17, 6, 18
18, 11, 10, 21, 10, 8, 25, 2
‘Johannes Trithemius was a sixteenth-century monk.’ She focuses on the lectern, avoiding eye contact with her audience. ‘For four hundred years, his book, Steganographia, remained an obscure text, but a few years back, an academic realized that it was riddled with messages. Steganography is a special kind of code – you have to know that it’s there to begin with. The inversion of his portrait wasn’t an accident. It was a clue, which I believe Gapes meant us to find quickly.’
She advances the deck to enlargements of half a dozen images. Arrows show where they were positioned on the wall.
The images containing numbers: one is a car license plate. Another is a street sign. A third is the registration of a commercial jet. In yet another, a man wearing a rhinestone shirt holds up a winning lottery ticket.
‘We ran every single picture containing a number through our mainframe. The analysis showed that they do not match the originals, all of which can be found online. They’ve been doctored for a purpose. Together, they form the series of digits displayed in the last slide. Apply a simple reverse-alphabet system to it, and this is what you get.’
She hits the remote. The figures melt away, leaving a message:
I SEE THE FACE OF GOD
YOU SHALL TOO
BEAR TRUE FAITH
HOPE PRAY
‘The sixteenth-century German alphabet didn’t contain the letter W, so I think it makes better sense rendered as: “I saw the face of God.” This may or may not be relevant, but Gapes tried to engage Colonel Cain in a dialogue on religion in the tower.
‘The second line may be an implicit threat to you, Mr President.’
Even though she’s now privy to No Stone, Hetta doesn’t do soft soap.
‘The third line has been taken from the oath an officer swears when commissioned – the oath you swore, Mr President, when you were inaugurated. The fourth line may be a reference to Colonel Cain’s wife, who featured prominently in a part of the cabin that we’ve termed the sanctum, though we don’t know for sure.’
‘Tell me what you think,’ Thompson says.
‘I think every piece of information on these walls contains meaning, sir.’
‘Meaning, Ms Hart?’
‘Messages, Mr President. On the nature of the threat that Gapes outlined to Colonel Cain.’
‘There are two distinct sections of the cabin.’ All eyes shift my way as I get to my feet. ‘The one you saw, Mr President, the main one, contains the seemingly random images. A second, roped off from the first in the sanctum, has five panels – five theme areas, each with two layers. One is dedicated to you, another to me. Mine is personal. Invasively so. It displays certain things I believed to be absolutely private. We don’t know yet how Gapes managed to get a hold of this information, but we’re operating on the assumption that he – or someone – hacked into my clearance document.’
‘There is one last piece of analysis I would like to share, Mr President,’ Hetta chips in as I sit back down.
‘Go ahead, Special Agent Hart.’
‘As my director mentioned, the images in the cabin taken in close proximity to you demonstrate one thing very clearly. If whoever took them wished to kill you, they had every opportunity to do so.’
‘So?’ Thompson says.
‘Duke Gapes was a whistleblower, sir. Not a conspirator.’
I smile to myself. Only Hetta can give credit to Cabot for this insight and make him look like a complete idiot at the same time.
‘A whistleblower?’
‘Duke Gapes had insider knowledge of a plot to kill you. A plot that clearly remains extant. But for a reason we don’t understand, he chose to present the data in the form of a riddle. Multiple riddles, in fact.’
Christy replaces her at the podium. ‘Mr President, it is my wholehearted recommendation that you put your announcement about the peace conference on hold.
‘Project Element is a covert operation undertaken by JaySOC to run down terrorist cells suspected of developing or seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. The tip of the spear is an Army action unit called the Activity.’
She pauses.
‘The Activity’s mandate for covert action was approved by the last administration, and that approval has been extended by oversight committees under your own. But even they are unaware of the precise scope of its mission.
‘Gapes was part of a deeply secret cell, tasked, we believe, with providing the Activity with special intel on the WMD threat. His files contain no hint of this. We’re not sure what he did provide. The compartmentalization and security surrounding this program is extreme. It was only when Colonel Cain deduced a connection between Gapes and the Activity that we were able to join the dots. My staff has spent the night working with lawyers to enable us – you and me, Mr President – to gain access to the files that confirmed the connection.’
Thompson’s eyes narrow. ‘And they still don’t specify Gapes’s role with this unit?’
‘No, sir. JaySOC holds the tasking mandate for the Activity, and its commander, General Johansson, is overseas.’
She pauses again.
‘For the past year, the Activity has been working with Russian Special Forces to track down terrorists plotting to use WMDs against our two nations. This may be significant, as there are a couple of allusions to the Russians in the five panels.
‘On Monday night, a partial note found in the church included the words “Proof” and “Jerusalem”. We believe the threat is linked to this man, the Engineer.’
She flashes up the sketch of Al-Mohandis in the cabin. ‘We have very little on him, except that he appears to be a bomb-maker. Jihadists boast that he will deliver them from the “Far Enemy”. That’s us. Lately, that chatter has increased. I’ve asked for a maximum effort from each of our intelligence agencies, Mr President, to tell us why.’
‘Jerusalem?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But nobody …’
Thompson gets to his feet. Faces turn to him. We need to hear something rousing, something reassuring. Something in future years, when the danger is long gone, we’ll all read, and feel good about.
But the President looks like he’s seen all four horsemen of the apocalypse. He picks up his briefing notes and walks from the room.
I know why.
The Engineer is the man with the bomb belt; the assassin from the President’s dreams.
In the silence that follows, I see something else: ground truth. The term Gapes used right before he was shot.
A tactical situation on the ground that may differ from one that has been identified in military intelligence reports and mission objectives.
There were no intelligence reports. The intel community considered the Engineer to be a joke, a myth; that he didn’t exist.
Gapes was attached to the Activity. He had some kind of special intelligence role within it. The Activity was tasked with hunting down terrorists seeking or armed with WMDs. The mythology said the Engineer was a bomb-maker.
I’m now in the helicopter that brought me back from the cabin, flying over that impenetrable black forest.
Dr Kate Ottoway. The dead white matter tracts in Gapes’s brain. The voices and hallucinations. His medication. The clinical insights I’d received as I’d gazed into that void – the thought it had produced and I’d then dismissed: the parts of the brain that Buddhists shut down when they meditate, the parts of the brain mediums engage when they go into ‘state’ …
Something finally clicks. Gapes’s knowledge about me; his pronouncements about my nature. Things he couldn’t possibly have known by anything other than the most extraordinary means.
His employment by INSCOM wasn’t an accident.
They needed him.
They recruited him.
Because he was psychic.