Not so much a hut or cabin, Walker saw, but a freight container. The small kind. Twenty feet long. Used for shipping and seen on the backs of trucks around the world. And here, on a mountain. Sitting on precast concrete footings that had been dropped in before the container. Maybe by air. A Chinook or something would do it easily enough—they were designed to drop huge artillery pieces and vehicles and tons of troops and supplies in otherwise inaccessible places. The Boeing CH-47: the workhouse of the US military since the 1960s. Walker missed them.
“How’d you get this up here?” Walker asked.
“I didn’t,” Paul said. “It was part of a fire-prevention thing in the eighties, when they started phasing out the watch towers. There are still a few of them dotted about. They were designed as refuges for fire crews who got separated. They’ve got water sprinkler systems all over to keep them cool for up to an hour, in the event of an emergency.”
He pulled the truck parallel and killed the engine. As they all climbed out they felt the cool mountain air. There was no view through the trees, which were pines and firs. Walker could make out the sound of running water nearby. The last melts from the winter, or maybe the creek ran like that year round. But he doubted it; on the track heading up he’d seen cedar and oak dying from drought. Systems playing havoc. If it wasn’t fires it was drought and if it wasn’t drought it was beetles or some such.
“What can we do here?” Monica asked.
Paul didn’t answer. He merely unlocked a hefty padlock at the end doors of the container and pushed aside some cobwebs. He then sprayed lubricant on spark leads and primed the fuel lines. The generator started up with a putt and cough, then he adjusted the fuel and air mix and rolled out a flexible exhaust hose. Beyond the generator were a couple of dirt bikes, which he wheeled out.
“Think you can kick these over?” he said to Walker.
Walker took the spray can and went to work on the bikes. One was four stroke, the other two. The two stroke started on the third kick-over, a puff of blue smoke belching out of the exhaust. Walker topped off the tank from a jerry can of gas and mixed in the two-stroke oil. The other bike took a couple of minutes of kicking-over, then Walker rode it around the container. The tires were sloppy and low on pressure, but he couldn’t see an air compressor. He turned off the bike and leaned it on its stand, next to the other, and went into the container.
The first room was the generator and storage area, about seven feet tall and wide and ten feet deep. A plastic water tank took up half the space. There was a wall behind that, about half a foot thick, and beyond that was another room. The door to get in was not unlike that on a battleship or submarine, in this case not to form a water-tight pressure seal but a smoke and heat barrier. This room was set up as the safe room. The floor and walls and ceiling were all half a foot less than what was a usual shipping container’s internal dimensions—insulated against the potential heat of a bushfire, Walker presumed. He had to duck to move about.
The only furnishings were a stack of plastic chairs, a fold-out camp bed and a desk. There was a stash of water bottles and canned food to last someone a couple of weeks.
“I’m going to connect via a VPN account that redirects to international servers at unpredictable intervals,” Paul said, setting up his laptop and then plugging it into a power board along with an extension lead, which he took and hooked up to a fold-up satellite dish that he clipped onto the container’s external door frame.
“And that will do what?”
“We’ll see what we see,” he said, calibrating his laptop and typing in commands to a screen that to Walker seemed archaic: a black background with plain type, mostly white, though some was in light blue and yellow. A series of commands and requests and data inputs and answers.
“The first attack that they had Jasper do was a multi-platform hack,” Paul said. “That’ll take us too long. Like, weeks. But this morning’s? One target, right? The OPM databases. I can look at that. The servers will be down but they’ll be ghosted elsewhere. I can see if he’s left us anything.”
“Breadcrumbs,” Walker said.
“That’s right,” Paul said, his fingers working faster on the keyboard than Walker thought possible. “Unless they had a techie or coder or someone as good as Jasper or me watching over his shoulder, they’d not notice it. Something small. A word or catchphrase that leads to a file. His chance to get a message out.”
“But if they had someone like that, why have Jasper at all?”
“True,” Paul said. “But Jasper would know things about the NSA that outsiders wouldn’t. So, you can bet that whatever is coming, one or more will be a cyber attack at the government or the NSA.”
“How long will this take?” Monica asked.
Paul’s fingers stopped for a split second, then resumed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Their systems are down and I’m gaining entry to other servers that acted as back-up until the time the techies there managed to disconnect it all. Maybe a few minutes, maybe up to an hour.”
He hit enter, and the screen scrolled with information, letters and numbers.
“I gotta go through all that,” Paul said. “Ah . . .”
He stopped and smiled. Pointed at the screen. A familiar word among the tech babble.
“Ares,” Walker said. “A Greek god?”
“Of war and chaos,” Monica said. “Jasper was always fascinated by Greek gods. And he’s always put them as place markers in his coding.”
“He put them into all his codes, a kind of signature,” Paul said. He reset the code running on the computer. “In September 2011, another piece of malware took to the Web: later named Gauss, it stole information and log-in credentials from banks in Lebanon. That had his fingerprints all over it.”
“That’s when Jasper was in Geneva,” Walker said.
“Right,” Paul said. “He was losing it. Seeing all the spy crap and what we were doing. I tried to talk him into quitting, coming out to the Valley and starting something up again. But he wouldn’t hear it. He wanted to work his way up, do what he could for the country. I kept telling him we could do more from the outside.”
“You always wanted more,” Monica said. “You always wanted the best. The unobtainable.”
“I was a teenager when you knew me, Mon.”
“It’s you.”
“I changed.”
Monica didn’t reply.
“Look, I get it, okay?” Paul said. “But this is it—it’s who I am. I work and I live and that’s it. You’ve seen my place. Hell. Maybe one day I’ll meet a girl and fall in love and get married and have a kid or two. That’d be great. I’ve got the time for it, doing what I do, right? All those guys I went to college with? They’re pulling eighty-hour weeks for what they earn and they’ve got it all in their Truman Show houses in Silicon Valley but you know what they don’t have—time. Time’s all I appreciate now. You would too. Jasper as well. If you’d been where I’ve been. It was minimum security, but still. You’ve got no idea. None.”
“Spare me,” Monica said.
“Well . . .” Paul flicked between screens and was running code on several sites at once. “Where would we end up if we never changed? In this wired world we are now all in. You’re in my world. All those people out there; social media masking as intimacy. Nope. I can’t do that. I wanted to be free. Out here, I’ve got that.”
“In late 2011,” Monica said after a moment, “Jasper was working on something big, he said, that would protect the country.”
“That’s what he told me too,” Paul said. “Something called Monster-Mind.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Walker said. “It’s an automated detection and protection system, right?”
“Yep,” Paul replied. “It detects cyber attacks and then strikes back, all on its own.”
“You never wanted to work on something like that?” Monica asked.
“Hackers have a reputation for getting high,” Paul said. “If I worked for the government, I could never get high again. Some of the best don’t join for that very reason. Plus, what would I do—join the DoD Cyber Unit? Have to do all that PT, the push-ups and runs and shooting drills? Pfft. No thanks.”
“We’ll make food,” Walker said, grabbing a small propane burner and a pot and a couple of cans of chili beans.
Monica looked at him like he was wasting time.
“Take it from someone who learned fast and learned the hard way: you eat and rest when you can,” Walker said.
She looked at Paul plugged into his computer and capitulated. She followed Walker outside the container and watched him set up the stove on a large boulder that was half-buried in the ground. He set the stove alight and poured the contents of the cans into the pot.
“I’m going for a walk,” Monica said. Walker hadn’t seen her make her way over to the truck, but she was there, leaning against the cab, hands in her pockets.
“Where?” Walker said, looking around.
“Does it matter?” she said.
Walker watched her. She was edgy again. Nervous energy. It was better to keep her occupied.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t go too far away. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“He said it might take up to an hour.”
“You’re going to walk for an hour?”
Monica shrugged.
“Are you okay?” Walker said, taking a step toward her.
“My brother’s been kidnapped and beaten and God knows what else to force him to destroy the free world in a day and a half. Yeah, I’m great.”
“I know you’re conflicted.”
“Am I?”
“He hurt you. Maybe this is his penance.”
“This isn’t about what he did to me.”
“I’m not saying it is.”
“But you think that’s clouding my thoughts?”
Walker remained silent.
Monica turned and headed down the overgrown track they had driven in on. Walker figured she wouldn’t venture off the track, and that she wouldn’t wander far. A wind from the north fluttered the first leaves of the fir trees. There were no other obvious paths, but he knew there would be more fire tracks snaking through the mountains, and that none would take her to a dead end. He found the continuation of this track on the other side of the container. It was more overgrown than the lower section.
He turned down the gas stove as the chili began to bubble and went back inside to look for bowls. He found some near the jerry cans in a stack of junk on the shelves. There were a few bottles of cheap-label booze as well. And a cash box. He pulled out the box and opened it. It contained a small bag of weed, some cigarette papers and little foil packs. The dust on the box told Walker it hadn’t been touched in a long time. But maybe that just meant that Paul hadn’t visited here in a long time, which seemed probable with the overgrown track leading up the mountain.
“That you, Walker?” Paul called out.
“No, it’s a bear,” Walker replied. He put back the box and went to the computer room.
Paul said to him, without looking up, “I need more speed—gotta try a different sat link. Can you tilt the dish ten degrees up and thirty to the right?”
“On it,” Walker said, heading outside.
“My mistake,” Paul called out a minute later. “Another ten to the right!”
Walker made the shift. “That good?”
“Checking . . . little more . . . yep.”
Walker returned to the stove and turned it off. He looked around and saw a world of brown-gray-greens around him with a light blue sky that punched through the trees. No sign of Monica.