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The man calling himself Ryan Duarte presented a government-issued CAC—Common Access Card—to the guard at the visitor control center, and waited patiently for the computerized card reader to confirm that he was authorized to continue beyond the checkpoint. That authorization was given only to government employees and private contractors who had passed an extensive background check, including at least one polygraph screening, and subsequently received additional training in the handling of materials with the designation SCI—Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. According to the information contained in the chip of the “smart” card, Ryan Duarte, a computer information specialist employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, had completed the requisite vetting process and was so authorized.
After about a minute, the card reader beeped and the guard removed the card and handed it back, along with a holographic facility-specific visitor’s identification badge.
“Make sure this is visible at all times,” the guard said.
Jimmy Letson thanked the guard and clipped the badge to his shirt front, before heading through to the waiting area for the on-campus shuttle. He waited until he was out of the guard’s line of sight to let out the breath he had been holding.
“One down,” he muttered. “Ninety-nine to go.”
It was a joke, of course. While there were in fact well over a hundred security checkpoints on the campus, he would only have to go through about a dozen or so. He would be searched and questioned, required to leave all his possessions in a secure locker, and then searched and questioned some more.
The card, along with the Ryan Duarte persona, was something he had created years before with the help of a confidential source inside the NSA. He had used it from time to time in his investigations to discreetly confirm claims from other sources, but always remotely, spoofing the login with his own computer equipment. With his computer compromised, that was no longer an option, which meant it was time for his alter-ego to make his debut public appearance.
He wasn’t worried about giving himself away. As a reporter, he’d bluffed his way into places with even tighter security. His real concern was that the Duarte alias might also be compromised. If that was the case, they wouldn’t arrest him at the front gate; no, they’d wait until he did something really illegal.
Like using his bogus credentials to log into a computer terminal to access and delete server logs.
He still had no idea what was going on or who was stalking him. All he knew for certain was that, a few days earlier while conducting some seemingly innocuous research for his friend Dane Maddock someone had initiated a back-trace on him, systematically preventing him from erasing the logs of the proxy servers he routinely employed to mask his IP address. What was really unusual, not to mention alarming, was the speed with which the back-trace had been executed. There were few agencies in the world with the resources to do that. The NSA was definitely one of them.
Yet, he didn’t think the American government was behind this action. For one thing, the servers he used as proxies were all in foreign countries—countries which did not cooperate with American law enforcement in the investigation of cyber-crimes. For another, he had not actually done anything illegal. And to the best of his knowledge, there was nothing sensitive about the research subject.
Maddock and his crew had discovered an old plane wreck off the coast of South Africa. The discovery of the plane—a Boeing 314 Clippership, manufactured in the 1930s—was unusual because only twelve such aircraft had ever been produced, and all twelve were accounted for. Jimmy had poked around in some historical archives and found nothing. Maddock had also recovered an artifact, a steel hatchet head engraved with a name and a presentation date—Steven Thorne. April 28, 1758—and apparently infused with some kind of metal that resisted corrosion. His research into that had similarly ended with no results. That should have been the end of the matter, but when he went to erase his digital footprints from the server logs, he discovered that he had already been frozen out.
Jimmy had gone to great lengths to safeguard himself, but there was no way to know for sure if those measures had worked. Panicking, he had severed the connection, shut his network down, and walked away.
Yet, he knew that running was no solution. It was not an exaggeration to say that computers were his life. He had spent more than two decades building his virtual existence, networking, mapping systems, finding backdoors and shortcuts. His pride and joy, NAILS—a heuristic deep-web search engine for prowling the deepest reaches of the dark net—represented an investment of thousands of hours and was, as far as he was concerned, completely irreplaceable. Starting over with a new identity simply wasn’t an option. Which left him only one course of action: He had to get his life back.
At a minimum, that would involve erasing the evidence of his search for the plane crash and the hatchet. From the NSA, he would be able to override whatever security measures had been used to block his access to the server logs. With a little luck, he might also be able to identify the entity responsible for that action, which would be of paramount importance in determining his next course of action.
Once he was inside, he went to one of the workstations designated for use by visiting personnel, and began the login process. As nerve-wracking as the multiple redundant security checks had been, logging into the workstation was even worse. What if the NSA was the agency that had blocked him? What if they knew about the Duarte alias, and were waiting for him to commit himself? What if—
The seal of the National Security Agency—a bald eagle, standing behind a shield with the color-scheme of an American flag, gripping an old-fashioned skeleton key in its talons—appeared on the screen, along with a simple welcome message.
Jimmy blew out his breath, and immediately began navigating to the first of several IP addresses he had earlier used as proxies to spoof his location. He was pleased to see that the system administrator login information had not changed, which would have been the first thing a real sysadmin would do following an intrusion, but his relief was short-lived. When he brought up the logs for the relevant time period, he found that the information had already been deleted. He checked another IP address in the proxy chain with the same result. Someone had beaten him to the punch.
He dug deeper into the maintenance logs, trying to find the identity of the person or agency who had made those alterations, but that information also appeared to have been scrubbed clean.
A cold lump of disappointment began to form in Jimmy’s gut. He checked the next proxy server in the chain, then another and yet another, but with the same result each time.
He checked the session timer. Almost ten minutes had elapsed since his login. In the age of high-speed data transfer, that was an eternity. Had the entity responsible for scrubbing the logs noticed him sniffing around? If so, it was already too late to do anything about it, but he felt an almost overwhelming urge to get moving. The longer he stayed, the greater his chances of being found out.
But as he was about to log out, inspiration struck. He went back to the logs, and one by one, examined each one, but this time, he opened the figurative window a little wider. He scrolled down the list of IP addresses for other users who had accessed the server within half an hour either way of his original search, and then did the same with each of the other servers looking for repeats.
It was a longshot, he knew, since any hacker worth his or her salt would almost certainly have spoofed a different IP address for each intrusion, but sometimes even the best made stupid little mistakes. Like re-using a spoofed server.
There it was.
The same IP address appeared on two different server logs.
It might have been a coincidence, but Jimmy felt certain it was not.
A trail of multiple proxies eventually led him to the SvalSat data hub in Norway and no further. Jimmy’s gut told him it probably wasn’t the original location of the hacker, but it was the end of the proxy chain.
And the end of what he could accomplish here.
He memorized the information and then, after doing what he could to cover his own tracks, logged off.
For a while after that, he just sat there, staring at the blank monitor, wondering what to do next. He was reasonably certain that no US government agency was responsible; they would not have erased the evidence of his intrusion....
Unless....
It occurred to him that he might have misread the situation completely. He had been working under the assumption that the entity in question was trying to track him down, either to arrest him or make him disappear, but what if they were simply trying to cover something up?
Instead of trying to figure out who’s responsible, he thought, I should be trying to figure out what’s so important about that old plane wreck.
But was it safe for him to go back home, return to his life—his computer—and carry on as if nothing had happened?
He pondered this a few seconds longer, and then realized that was the wrong question, too. Maybe it wasn’t safe, but he was done running. He had skills, after all.
He took a deep breath, found his center and stood up from the workstation. Some part of him still half-expected a squad of agents to materialize and surround him, but nobody in the building seemed to pay him any special attention. The guards searched him perfunctorily to make sure he wasn’t trying to leave with any classified data, and then returned his checked belongings to him and bade him good day. His fellow passengers on the shuttle back to the visitors’ welcome center didn’t even look his way, and when he handed back his temporary ID badge, the guard actually smiled at him.
As he started the rental car and pulled out of his parking spot, Jimmy shifted his mental gears to his next task. With the illicit foray into the nation’s premier intelligence gathering service behind him, he would now return to where it had all started—the mysterious plane wreck. Maybe there wasn’t a digital record, but there had to be a paper trail.
He steered out of the parking lot and onto Canine Road, following the signs to the onramp for the southbound lanes of the freeway.
He wondered if Maddock had discovered anything more about it, and made a mental note to contact the treasure hunter as soon—
The car abruptly jolted forward, and Jimmy’s head snapped back a little, though not enough to cause any pain. The accompanying noise—like a car door slamming—left little doubt as to what had just occurred.
“What the hell?” he snarled, more irritated than angry. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the silver car that had just bumped him, still tailgating but backing away slowly.
A faint tingle of fear went through him. What if this was more than just a simple bumper-thumper? What if this was the enemy action he had been expecting all along?
The silver car’s emergency flashers came on and then the vehicle pulled over into the breakdown lane and kept rolling forward slowly, subtly indicating that he should do the same. Jimmy slowed but did not pull over.
If this was just an ordinary traffic accident, he would need to stop, need to get the other driver’s insurance information. He doubted there was any damage, but didn’t want to be on the hook with the rental company for even minor repairs.
He looked around. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road, but enough that if this was more than it seemed to be, he could start waving his arms frantically for help, or simply take off running. The NSA headquarters building was only about two hundred feet away, and he wouldn’t have to even reach the building to get the attention of the security guards.
Unless of course they’re the ones behind this, he thought. But then why let me leave the building? “You’re just being paranoid, Jimmy,” he muttered to himself.
He flipped on his turn signal and pulled to the side, but left the engine on, the automatic transmission still in gear, his foot on the brake. If this went sideways, or if he just got a funny feeling, all he would have to do is stomp on the gas pedal.
The silver car stopped a couple lengths behind him and the driver—a tall lanky man, dressed in jeans with a button-up work shirt and wearing a brown Indiana Jones-style fedora—got out and began advancing toward Jimmy’s door. The brim of the hat mostly hid the man’s face; other than his race—Caucasian—Jimmy couldn’t determine much else about the man. He surreptitiously checked to make sure his door was locked and then cracked the window a few inches.
The man tipped his hat back, exposing a face that, while smiling, appeared taciturn. He looked to be about the same age as Jimmy, and there was something vaguely familiar about him, but Jimmy couldn’t put his finger on it.
The man placed one hand on the roof of the car and leaned down, putting his face close to the gap in the window, and as he did, the smile slipped completely away. “Hello, Letson. Been a while, huh?”