DELUCA RECEIVED A CALL AT HIS HOTEL IN Colorado Springs at 0600 hours, telling him his 0900 hour appointment with General Thomas Koenig was being put on hold and to stand by. He waited at the hotel until noon, read the paper, went for a run (carrying his SATphone in his hand), a swim in the pool, had lunch in a restaurant his guide book said was the best in town (using his government credit card), bought a ski parka for Bonnie on sale (using his own), got a call at 1450 hours saying the general would meet him at 1600 hours, and was halfway to Peterson Air Force Base in the government-issue unmarked Ford Taurus he’d drawn from the 901st MI motor pool out of Fort Carson when his phone rang again to tell him the meeting had been rescheduled for the following morning, with the location moved to the operations center at Cheyenne Mountain.
He spent part of the night nursing a beer in the hotel bar, listening to a musician sporting a two-inch ponytail strumming an Ovation guitar with too much chorus on his amplifier singing James Taylor and Cat Stevens covers with his eyes closed, until DeLuca couldn’t take it any more (and he’d been trained to withstand torture) and went to his room, where he reread Sergeant Cheryl Escavedo’s 201 file.
It was a good record, superlative, really, describing able and honorable service. She’d been named Army Space and Missile Defense Command’s senior NCO for 2002 in her capacity as SIIM (Supervisor, Information Integration and Management), USSTRATCOM, Systems Center, after being transferred to Peterson AFB and NORAD from the Arizona Guard. She’d been honor graduate of her PLDC class, top PT score of her BNCOC class, and she’d taken an advanced degree in information technology management from Colorado Technical University in Colorado Springs. She’d won the Joint Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Commendations Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, drilled with the joint honor guard, had been active with the Association of the United States Army as its legislative affairs representative, served on the Pike’s Peak Chapter of the International Association of Administrative Professionals, and worked at the Colorado Springs Women’s Center in her spare time, though DeLuca couldn’t imagine her having too much spare time. She had eleven performance awards, seven time-off awards, three attached letters of commendation, and even a note included from the children at Kit Carson Elementary thanking her for coming to their class and talking about what they did at NORAD, closing with, “Thank you for keeping our country safe.” She’d graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Tucson, where she’d been president of the Kappa Kappa Kappa sorority, a social organization that, if DeLuca remembered his undergraduate days at the U of A correctly, only accepted total babes who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire unless you were rich and owned a hot car. Judging from her photograph, DeLuca gathered the Tri-Kaps hadn’t accepted Cheryl Escavedo, a Native American, solely as a token gesture of affirmative action. She was quite attractive, with silky black hair and big doe eyes, full lips, and a chest that could have held a lot more medals. If she wasn’t dating anybody, DeLuca surmised, it probably wouldn’t have been due to a lack of attention.
He rose before dawn, went for a run, grabbed a continental breakfast at the buffet, and was presenting his credentials at the gatehouse to the razor-wire-girded Protect Level 1 parking lot by 0700 hours. It was his hope that word would spread throughout the command that someone from CI was asking questions about the missing woman. It wasn’t all that different from driving into an Iraqi marketplace in a convoy of up-armored Humvees and Bradleys—the noise made the bad guys scatter, but it also brought the good guys out of hiding, the informants who had the information he needed.
It had been snowing when he left the hotel, the six-mile drive up a winding mountain road something of an adventure, particularly when plows coming down the mountain seemed to thunder by at ninety miles an hour with their blades missing his car by only a few inches. But the pine trees looked lovely in the snow. Twice he passed small groups of deer, one group feeding in a field, another scampering across the road in front of his car.
There was a large office building below the entrance to the underground complex labeled Building 101—Technical Support Facility. The parking lot was only half full. At the turn into it, a billboard read: “Welcome to Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, our motto: ‘Deter, Detect, Defend.’ Home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and Air Force Space Command (AFSPC). A Bi-National Facility,” the last a reference to the fact that about a quarter of the personnel were Canadian, since an attack on the United States by Russian ICBMs (the original reason for NORAD) would most likely have to come through Canadian airspace. He was finally met outside Building 100, the security building, by an African American woman who introduced herself as Sergeant First Class Gail Davies. He took his B’s and C’s from his coat pocket and handed them to her.
“Welcome to Colorado,” she said with a salute. “Is it… Mr.… ?”
“David,” he said. “Special Agent DeLuca, if you need a title. You didn’t have to wait outside for me.”
“I’ve been in The Mountain for the last twenty-four hours,” she said. “You get to where you’ll take any chance you get for a little fresh air.”
He was wearing a herringbone sport jacket over black pants and a white shirt, his tie pulled tight to his throat but with his top button unfastened beneath it. He’d worn a uniform in Iraq, but here he was strictly plainclothes.
“Do you ski, Agent DeLuca?” she asked, glancing at his credentials before handing them back.
“Like a six-year-old,” he said. “I’ve gone off on weekends with my wife, but nothing like what you have in Colorado. You?”
“I snowboard. My son’s a knuckle dragger. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Have you ever been in ‘The Hole’ before?” she asked, guiding him into the security building.
“I lived off my credit cards for about a year after college, if that’s what you mean,” DeLuca said. In Security, he was led through a metal detector, though unlike at the airport, he wasn’t required to remove his shoes. A sign on the wall informed him that neither smoking nor weapons were allowed inside the complex, and that he should turn his cell phone off.
“They don’t work inside the complex anyway,” Davies said, leading him through a turnstile and into the mouth of a tunnel, where a bus, something like an airport shuttle, waited for them.
“The entry tunnel is a little over a mile long between north and south portals and banana-shaped. The blast doors are at the midpoint on the inside curve. It’s designed so that the compression force from any detonation outside the facility will pass through the mountain and out the other side.” The bus began to move. They were accompanied by a pair of young Canadian officers, one reading the paper, the other with his headphones on. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“Nope,” he said, though he’d had enough miserable experiences in underground bunkers in Iraq to last him a while.
“You’re in luck then,” she said, “because today’s a full combat-readiness lockdown.”
“How often do you run lockdowns?” he asked. “They’re scheduled in advance?”
“It depends,” she said. “Wing-level exercises are more common than global. We locked down for real after 9/11 and people stayed inside for days before we were sure what we were looking at. The doors themselves are tested regularly. They’re calling today’s exercise Moses 2, as in ‘lost in the wilderness’—what do we do if we lose our global positioning system? It involves the 527th, so it’s a bit more complicated.”
“The 527th?” he asked.
“Aggressor Squadron,” she said. “Like the guys who learned to fly Russian MIGs for all the Top Guns to practice against during the Cold War, only now we do it with satellites. And computers.”
They paused at the blast doors and watched as they sealed shut behind them, a man and a woman scurrying past the guard to get out before it was too late.
“You’re standing behind twenty-five tons of steel, or actually fifty because each blast door is twenty-five tons and curved to withstand a multimegaton weapon detonating as close as half a mile away, nautical.”
“Do people get searched on their way out?” DeLuca asked. “Or in, for that matter.”
“Permanent party members, no,” Sergeant Davies said. “Visitors, yes.” She led him into the complex, explaining as she went. “The central excavation consists of three main chambers, forty-five feet wide, sixty feet high, and two football fields long, intersected by four connecting chambers thirty-two feet wide, fifty-six feet high, and slightly more than one football field long, giving us a four-and-a-half-acre grid. You have two thousand feet of solid granite over your head. All the buildings and connecting tunnels inside are constructed from continuous-weld low-carbon steel plates to attenuate any electromagnetic pulses, and each building has its own blast doors to resist overpressure and to serve as fire doors, with blast valves in reinforced concrete bulkheads to protect the air, water, and sewer lines. The buildings and tunnels are mounted on more than thirteen hundred half-ton steel springs, which make the buildings both blast-resistant and earthquake-proof, able to move twelve inches in any direction. We have a medical facility, a gym with treadmills and elliptical machines and weight machines and free weights, and a full kitchen and dining facility, right here, serving four meals a day including midnight snacks…”
She opened the door and showed him the cafeteria, which included a salad bar, an entree line, and a separate line for fast-food items. He noted, on the walls, large painted murals of rocky mountain landscapes, as if to create the illusion of a window view.
“We don’t have living quarters, per se,” she said, “except for the firefighters who work on twenty-four-hour shifts, but in an emergency, we have cots for everyone, and if we were to run out of food, we have plenty of MREs in storage. The chefs in the kitchen also have over two hundred recipes for the preparation of human flesh, should we have to resort to cannibalism. That’s a joke.”
“Good one,” DeLuca said.
“We have seven ops centers. Air Warning, Missile Warning, Space Control, Operational Intelligence, Combat Command, Systems and Weather, all running 24/7/365. Missile and Air Warning are probably the ones you already know about, responsible for the ADIZ, or air defense intercept zone. It’s still fixed antennae and phased array radars, but that’s being supplemented with space-based infrared now. Space control’s satellite surveillance network tracks everything in orbit around the earth down to the size of a baseball, over twenty-six thousand objects since this place was built in 1957, with about eighty-five hundred currently in orbit, and about 20 percent of those are functional payloads or satellites, and the rest of it is space junk, rocket parts and that sort of thing. We track both for threat assessment and collision avoidance—we’ve rerouted the Space Shuttle twelve times to keep it from running into something up there, though the main debris field orbits about five hundred kilometers farther out than the shuttle, which orbits at about three hundred kilometers. We also try to calculate the footprint that satellites are going to leave when they reenter earth’s atmosphere, with lighter impacts at the heel and the heavier stuff falling at the toe, but since the earth’s surface is 70 percent water and only 25 percent of the land mass is inhabited, so far we haven’t had to issue any alerts.”
She ran the security card that hung from her neck on a chain through a scanner that opened a set of doors.
“I’ll take you to General Koenig’s office at STRATCOM, though I think he’s in a meeting with NORTHCOM right now. He should be finished soon.”
“That’s the command set up after 9/11, right?” DeLuca said, though he already knew the answer to his question. Tasked to monitor internal airspace after the Twin Towers.
“That’s correct,” she said. “We have about five thousand private aircraft flying at any one time and NORTHCOM watches those. You sound like you’re from the East Coast. Did you know anybody in the World Trade Center?”
“My sister Elaine worked there,” DeLuca said. “She didn’t get out.”
“I’m sorry,” Sergeant Davies said. “I’ll take you to the general’s office.”
Despite claiming immunity to claustrophobia, he couldn’t help pondering the notion that there was two thousand feet of rock over his head, and how much it would hurt if it fell on him. The waiting room outside the general’s office was relatively calm, while people scurried back and forth in the hallway beyond the open door, the alarm siren a pleasant pinging sound, still ringing.
The general’s secretary, a brawny lieutenant named Carr, entered, examined DeLuca’s badge and credentials, and told him the general would be a few more minutes. When General Koenig finally arrived, he held up a finger to tell DeLuca he needed another minute, then consulted with his secretary behind a closed office door a moment longer. When he finally opened the door, he nodded to DeLuca without saying a word.
The office was small, for a general, but given the circumstances, that made sense. The wall opposite the desk featured a large flat-screen monitor, showing a photograph of a windblown beach that DeLuca took to be the general’s screen saver. The wall behind the desk held framed certificates, diplomas, awards, and photographs, one of a younger Koenig shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, one of him with President Bush (George H.), and another with President George W. DeLuca wondered if there was one with Clinton, tucked away somewhere. Koenig was a tall man, six-foot-four and lean, in his late fifties but fit enough to pass for forty, with close-cropped black hair, a square jaw, and eyes that looked a bit too tight, as if he’d had work done on them. On the wall opposite the door was a large color photograph of a sailboat. It was the only thing in the room resembling decoration.
“She’s a beautiful boat, General,” DeLuca said.
“She is,” Koenig agreed.
“I don’t sail,” DeLuca said. “And I grew up on the ocean. Long Island.”
“I’m from a naval family,” Koenig said. The general waited. So much, DeLuca thought, for drawing him out with small talk and personal charm.
“How’s Moses 2 going?” DeLuca asked. “If I may ask.”
“It’s going well,” General Koenig replied. “The people we get here are the best at what they do. This is where the cream rises to.”
“Can I ask what the nature of today’s exercise is?” DeLuca said. “Just so I understand what I’m seeing. I have a TS/SCI clearance, in case you’re concerned.”
“I know your clearances, Agent DeLuca,” Koenig said. “Today’s exercise posits the catastrophic loss of global positioning capabilities.”
“Loss from what? Or who?”
“Well that would be the first thing we’d want to find out, wouldn’t it?” Koenig said. DeLuca sensed Koenig was struggling not to sound condescending, but DeLuca held his ground. It was rare, in the military, to meet someone in authority who possessed both high intelligence (one memo on Koenig said his IQ had tested in the high 180s at West Point) and the ability to suffer fools gladly. The psychological evaluation in Koenig’s 201 noted a tendency to micromanage, which, in DeLuca’s experience, was often accompanied by a lack of patience. His instincts told him he was going to get more out of Koenig if he pretended to be exactly the sort of annoying idiot Koenig shouldn’t have to explain things to. Plus, he was still pissed off at being rescheduled, something for which Koenig had yet to apologize. DeLuca’d never cared for those officers who felt rank meant never having to say you’re sorry. In fact, he never cared much for officers, period.
“At the moment,” Koenig said, “we’re getting intel from ship-based X-band in the Beaufort Sea that suggest a kill-vehicle launch, but without GPS to reconfirm, sea-based data gets a little fuzzy. In about five minutes, those guys are going to be digging for charts and sextants.”
“Who’s launching kill vehicles?” DeLuca asked.
“Nobody,” Koenig said. “That’s a decoy. In about ten minutes, someone is going to walk through that door and tell me we have SBL ASATs. And if all goes well, about five minutes after that, somebody else is going to tell me that’s wrong, too, and that the lasers that hosed us are ground-based and not space-based. All of which should have happened in about a third the time, and will, the next time we run this scenario. Am I to understand that I’m here to brief you on STRATCOM def-cons, Agent DeLuca?”
“No, sir,” DeLuca said. “I just need enough to know how to put things in context when I write up my report. ASAT means antisatellite?”
Koenig nodded.
“Just so I understand, our GPS system has been hit by ground-based lasers—is that right? So that would be Soviet? Are you guys still using the word ‘Soviet’?”
“Russian,” Koenig said. DeLuca waited. Finally Koenig tapped at his computer keyboard. The beachscape on Koenig’s plasma screen dissolved into a Mercatur-projection map of the world. DeLuca swiveled in his chair. There were lights on the map that the key identified as dedicated, collateral, and contributing sensors, marking locations at Kaena Point and Maui (Hawaii), Clear and Cobra Dane (Shemya Island, Alaska), Beale AFB (California), Socorro (New Mexico), Eglin AFB (Florida), Cape Cod (Massachusetts), Millstone/Haystack (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Thule (Greenland), Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, Fylingdales (England), Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and Altair/Alcor in the South Pacific. A caption at the bottom of the screen identified the display as the SSN or Satellite Surveillance Network.
“This is what we have on the ground, looking up,” Koenig said, “radar and electro-optical.” He clicked on an icon labeled MSX. “This is what we’ve been using to look down from space. Mid-course Space Experiment, mostly UV and very long-wave infrared. These systems track about eighty-five hundred man-made objects ten centimeters or larger, of which 7 percent are operational satellites and the rest is shit. The Russians have about one hundred military satellites active and an unknown number of sleepers, but we think for every one they light up, they put up another that they don’t, and until they turn ’em on, we can’t figure out what they’re for. Yet. We know they have space-based lasers, but so far, power demands limit miniaturization, so anything powerful enough to knock one of our birds down would have to be big enough for us to find, even without lighting it up. On the other hand, it takes much less energy to simply blind our sensors, from space, and only slightly more from the ground. We’ve hosed satellites with as low as thirty watts from ground, using chemical lasers. To blow something out of the sky from the ground, regardless of spin or shielding, you need at least four hundred megawatts, or enough electricity to run a medium-sized city, because only a tenth of the energy is going to reach the target. That’s still a thousand times more powerful than existing lasers. Hydrogen-fluoride-powered lasers that size in space would need about two thousand tons of fuel, so they’d be enormous. Single-use X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions would be smaller, but obviously you’re not going to conceal your deployment. So, when we lose a satellite, we look for hosings first, kill vehicles or kinetics second, and full-power directed-energy last. And different satellites are shielded in different ways, so to defend, you have to figure out what hit you, how powerful, from what direction, and exactly when, and then you can start to know what you’re up against and which offensive capabilities to deploy in retaliation. Is that enough for your report?”
“More than enough,” DeLuca said. “I wasn’t aware that the Russians have lasers they could use from the ground to blind our satellites. Is this recent?” This was a lie. His son Scott had e-mailed him all the material he needed to read to get up to speed, though nothing that would qualify him as an expert.
“They’ve had them since at least 1976,” Koenig said. He clicked into archives and called up a new overlay, with four new icons superimposed over the former Soviet Union. “We got a code ten-ten on a keyhole-eleven that got painted after we sent it to watch a launch at their missile base at Tyuratam. The first Soviet GBL was at Sary Shagan. Even after the Gorbachev collapse, they kept funding laser projects in Nurek, Tajikistan, and another in the Caucasus Mountains in Kazakhstan, and one in Dushanbe. And of course, whenever they sent a bird to watch what the DOD was boosting from Vandenberg, we hosed them out of Maui and Oahu and a facility in Capistrano, though that one’s been moved to Cloud Croft, New Mexico. It’s one reason we sometimes smile when the liberal elite starts making a fuss about weaponizing space—they might as well protest nuclear missiles on submarines. That cow left the barn a long time ago. The question, since the beginning of SDI in the first Reagan administration, hasn’t been whether. It’s been how to do it right and where to allocate the resources.”
“Most people think the Space Defense Initiative is over. I think I read somebody saying Reagan only proposed Star Wars to make the Soviet economy go bust trying to keep up with us.”
“Most people don’t know anything,” Koenig said. “Reagan proposed Star Wars because he knew that if all you really want to do is build a small town in Kansas, you have to tell Congress you want to put a million people on the moon, so that Congress can step in and say, ‘No, you can’t do that, but we’ll let you build a small town in Kansas.’ And the space program is one of the few things the Russians ever did right. In my opinion.”
“Your opinion is something I highly respect, sir,” DeLuca said. “So this is still going on? ‘Hosing satellites,’ as you put it?”
“Not as much,” Koenig said. “Partly because both sides put it on the table at SALT and largely because by then, 1991 or so, it was easier to jam a satellite’s communications and make it deaf than it was to paint it and make it blind. The battle for the ultimate high ground, as the media puts it, is still going on. I just got a report recently that said the Russian space defense budget for next year is going to be 50 percent higher than it’s ever been before. And they’re hardly the only country up there.”
“I read about Rumsfeld warning against a Pearl Harbor in space,” DeLuca said. “I’m assuming that means you guys are getting the funding you need, black budget or otherwise…”
Koenig didn’t say anything. Apparently the tutorial part of the interview was over.
“Okay. Very helpful. Moving on. Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “Reason I’m here. Did you get a chance to look at the report?”
“I read it last night,” Koenig said, which DeLuca found interesting, because they were supposed to have met yesterday. “How can I help you?”
“Well,” DeLuca said, “whatever occurs to you, I suppose. I’m still trying to get to know her. She worked in the Systems Center?”
“Major Huston can help you there,” Koenig said. “I’ve briefed him and told him you’ll be visiting.”
“And her duties were… ?”
“She was in archives,” Koenig said. “Again, Major Huston is the one you’ll want to talk to.”
“What does archives do?”
“What do you think they do?” Koenig said. “We’ve been keeping track of everything in the sky for the last forty-five years, Agent DeLuca. It’s one thing to have the information and another to be able to use it efficiently. Plus, because of our security, Cheyenne is a repository for other government files beyond our purview.”
“And she had access to all of it?”
“I don’t believe she had access to all of it,” Koenig said. “At least not authorized access, but she definitely handled sensitive material. Major Huston can help you there.”
“I’ll ask him about that, then,” DeLuca said. “What was your impression of her? Any sense of why she’d be taking documents?”
“My impression of her?” Koenig said.
“Yeah,” DeLuca said. “Did you know her personally?”
“Did I know her personally?” Koenig said. DeLuca noted that this was twice in a row that Koenig had repeated what DeLuca had just said to him. Such repetitions were usually followed by lies. He waited. Koenig said nothing.
“I guess I was thinking that with only 230 people in such close proximity, eventually everybody would get to know everybody else, sooner or later. And a girl like her would be pretty hard to miss.”
“I didn’t know Sergeant Escavedo personally,” Koenig said. “You’re right about the proximity. You see people on the bus if you work the same shift, but people are also transferred or rotated in and out on a fairly regular basis. My impression, without meeting her and solely from reading her file and looking at her records and awards, would be that she was a good person and a conscientious soldier who was probably just trying to do her job better by taking work home on her laptop that wasn’t supposed to leave The Mountain. But that’s just an impression and not a fact.”
“She couldn’t send it to herself?” DeLuca said. “She had to carry it physically?”
“The firewalls protecting our data systems make the two thousand feet of granite over our heads right now look like eggshells,” Koenig said. “But again…”
“Major Huston,” DeLuca said. “I will definitely ask him about that. I’m just trying to figure out how she got the disks or the CDs or whatever it was out. I guess since you don’t search people, she just took them with her in her briefcase. That doesn’t seem terribly secure, though.”
“That is under review,” Koenig said. “That should not have happened. We take the idea of missing files very seriously around here, Agent.”
“This one is more than just missing files,” DeLuca said. “This one’s a missing person. We found her car in the desert, about ten miles north of the Mexican border.”
At that moment, just as the general had predicted, an officer in Navy whites knocked on the door to inform Koenig that (if DeLuca was decoding the mil-speak correctly) preliminary telemetry triangulating from the early warning sensors on two of the GPS sats indicated space-based lasers, and that a suspect Russian satellite that had turned active a few minutes before the attack was already being targeted.
“Ensign Stern will take you to systems,” Koenig told DeLuca. “Will you keep my office informed if you learn anything?”
“I will,” DeLuca said. “Thank you for your time.”
In the corridor connecting STRATCOM to the other commands and centers, DeLuca asked Stern to pause while he examined a row of framed color photographs depicting the officers, noncommissioned officers, enlisted persons, and civilians of the year. When he came to the year 2002, DeLuca saw a photograph of Cheryl Escavedo, smiling, proud of herself, posed receiving the award and shaking the hand of General Thomas Koenig, who had just said he didn’t know her personally.
Perhaps he’d forgotten.
He hadn’t asked Koenig, because he didn’t think he’d get a straight answer, why someone with as superlative a service record as Cheryl Escavedo would be transferred from Cheyenne Mountain to an administrative position filling out forms for new recruits at the Military Entrance Processing Station in Albuquerque. “This is where the cream rises to,” Koenig had said. There was something fishy about that, beyond ending a sentence with a preposition.
Major Huston reminded DeLuca of the Ken dolls his sister Elaine had played with as a child, stiff and plastic and a bit effeminate. His smile reminded DeLuca of the televangelists he’d seen on TV, the Pat Robertsons and the Jerry Falwells, so transparently unctuous and treacly, accompanied by that pseudo-compassionate tilt of the head that always made DeLuca check to make sure no one was lifting his wallet. Huston was young, midthirties, and fit, DeLuca allowed, though his handshake was soft and clammy.
“Come in, come in,” Huston said. “Sorry you caught us at such a busy moment. Can I get you a coffee or tea?”
DeLuca asked for a coffee, two creams, no sugar, after noticing there wasn’t a coffee pot in the room. When Major Huston stepped out, DeLuca had a quick look around. The pictures on Major Huston’s desk were of his children, a boy and a girl, both in white confirmation robes, and another of the whole family in front of a Christmas tree, Huston with his arm around his wife, a buxom overweight blonde in a white turtleneck sweater, the tree topped by a large crystal angel. On a bookshelf opposite the door, DeLuca saw three photographs framed and hinged together in a triptych, the center photograph showing Huston in full deer-hunting forest camo, with his son on the left side of the triptych and his daughter on the right, both also dressed in camo, and in each picture, a recently slain deer, the slayer lifting the head of the dead animal by the antlers to display the kill. The daughter looked like she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. A mountain with a peak resembling a snow-capped pyramid rose in the background.
“Do you hunt, Agent DeLuca?” Huston said when he returned, handing DeLuca a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Rebecca was so proud when she got that buck. You should have seen her face.”
“I don’t,” DeLuca said. He somehow doubted, by the way he smirked, that Major Huston had ever fired a weapon in combat. “But I enjoy being invited over for a nice venison dinner by friends who do.”
“My wife makes a tremendous venison sausage,” Huston said. “Tremendous. But she’s from Kentucky, where they have a long history of preparing game.”
“Where did you grow up?” DeLuca asked.
“Muncie, Indiana,” Huston said. “My parents were missionaries, so I was actually born in Madagascar, but we moved back home when I was two.”
“What can you tell me about Cheryl Escavedo?” DeLuca said. “Or maybe you should backtrack just a bit and tell me what you do here in the systems center.”
“Well, what I usually tell people is that we don’t run the place, but we make sure the place runs,” Huston said. “All the physical systems and environmental-mechanical systems, but all the electronics, too. Communications, computers, IT, finance. We’re tech support but we’re software design, too. We’re a server farm, and we do network hubbing for other agencies. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the Internet was basically invented here as a way of routing data and communications in a nuclear war. These days, we have to monitor it for threat assessment. A big part of our job is keeping up with the tech environment, and that changes on a daily basis. We throw stuff out every month that would be an upgrade almost everywhere else. And I have to tell you, Cheryl was a big part of the team. We loved Cheryl. I was completely shocked when I learned she’d been taking home documents.”
“When did you learn? Or how?”
“We run an automated surveillance program,” Huston said. “One component of it is that we twin people’s keystrokes, at random, so you never know if what you’re doing is being duplicated and sent out for review. It’s not a secret. Everyone who works here knows it’s part of the deal. Cheryl Escavedo certainly knew.”
“Reviewed where?”
“That’s automated, too, initially, but the program is rather sophisticated. The program is designed to filter for a variety of keywords and triggers. If, for example, you were writing a letter to the Russian embassy, not that anyone here would be so stupid, but if you were, that would trigger full surveillance and oversight by the security office.”
“E-mail goes in and out?” DeLuca asked.
“It does, but nothing gets in or out without being fully scrutinized and analyzed first.”
“By human beings or computers?”
“Both,” Huston said. “The computers suggest what to look at. We have the most secure communications in the world, Mr. DeLuca.”
“And this is all done on your computers in-house?” DeLuca asked. “No exceptions?”
“Command heads can override it,” Huston said. “But that’s only four people.”
“General Koenig?” Huston nodded.
“It was General Koenig’s team that designed the system,” Huston added.
“Does he look over your shoulder much?” DeLuca asked. “How much of his time does he spend in The Mountain and how much in building A?”
Huston had to think.
“I’d guess maybe 50 percent in each,” Huston said. “But I’m not all that familiar with the general’s schedule. And no, he does not look over my shoulder. The general is an excellent manager and part of that is being an able delegater. He expects a great deal from his people and he gets it.”
DeLuca wondered what made Huston so protective of Koenig. Such protective loyalty wasn’t so unusual in the Army, particularly among ass suckers and sycophants.
“So this system flagged Cheryl Escavedo’s keystrokes… ?”
“Not precisely,” Huston said. “In fact, we were running a system challenge, not unlike the exercise going on right now. Operation Holdfast, it was called, testing for structural failure and the back-up protocols that kick in when the firewall is either down or breached.”
“When was this?” DeLuca asked.
“November 9, between 0436 and 0445 hours.”
“Testing the night shift?”
“There’s no such thing as a night shift in The Mountain,” Huston said. “After you’re inside for more than forty-eight hours, you lose track of time. We have to force people to take downtime or to sleep because the body’s sidereal mechanisms need photoperiodicity to operate normally. At any rate, what I was beginning to say was that for a brief period of time, between when the system was down and before the back-up protocols kicked in, we were vulnerable.”
“For how long?”
“I’d say no more than a minute,” Huston said. “And even then, we looked pretty close at everything that happened during that minute.”
“This was when she copied the files?”
“It was the most likely opportunity,” Huston said. “Maybe the only one. We didn’t catch it until months later, when analysts at NSA were reviewing the data from Holdfast and noticed that the clock on one of the computers had reset itself. Nobody made much of it until someone looking for anomalies noticed the clock had reset itself by months rather than minutes. What we think happened was that Sergeant Escavedo changed the clock on her computer, during that sixty-second window of opportunity, copied the files to either diskettes or CDs, probably CDs, but backdated that information so that the surveillance program wouldn’t search for it when it came back on line—why look where you think you’ve already looked?”
“Backdated to when?”
“To 0437 hours, May 9,” Huston said. “Six months to the day, hour, and one minute more, which is how long the system archives information before making the decision what to keep and what to delete, and this would have been something the program would have deleted.”
“Isn’t deleted material recoverable?” DeLuca asked.
“On your PC back home, yes, but the way we delete things, no.”
“Just so that I understand,” DeLuca said, “what you’re saying is that you have no idea what was taken, or how much of it is missing. And that it couldn’t have been accidental or inadvertent—it was planned. Do I have that right?”
“You do, unfortunately,” Huston said. “But it had to physically leave The Mountain. It didn’t go out electronically. So she could only take as much as she could copy in sixty seconds. We think two CDs at the most, or one diskette. And people aren’t supposed to be able to do that, take anything out, but apparently portal security can be compromised.”
“Or charmed,” DeLuca said. “Like that episode of Seinfeld, where he was dating the blonde who was so attractive she could talk her way out of any traffic violation. Which I have to say, from all my years as a policeman, is truer than I’d care to admit.”
Major Huston’s face was a blank.
“You never watched Seinfeld?”
“That would be a television program?” Huston inquired.
“Uh huh,” DeLuca said, wondering if Huston was putting him on, though he was too humorless to put him on. “Used to be. It’s in reruns now.”
“We don’t own a television,” Huston said. “We home school.”
“Well,” DeLuca said. “I’m not trying to be sexist here, but I’d imagine a woman as attractive as Cheryl Escavedo could get over on a lot of guys, including security guards.”
“God certainly favored her with great physical beauty,” Huston said. “Matched by her native intelligence. We thought her a person of all-around good character. Everyone did.”
DeLuca was fishing around to see if he could pick up any sense that Huston might have had the hots for Cheryl Escavedo, but it didn’t appear that Major Huston knew what the hots were.
“Was she dating anybody, that you knew of?” he asked. “Any personal problems? Alcohol? Drug habits? Credit card debt?” Huston shook his head at each question. “And she was transferred to MEPS a week later? November 16, right?”
“That’s right,” Huston said.
“Did she have advance warning that Holdfast was coming? Change her schedule to make sure she was here when it happened? Anything like that?”
“I don’t think so,” Huston said. “I knew, and of course the command officers knew. I don’t know how she could have known, other than by intuition.”
“Maybe she had something in mind and was just waiting for the right moment,” DeLuca said. “What sort of things did she have access to, through her job?”
“Pretty much everything,” Huston said. “Just because something is archived doesn’t mean it’s declassified. It could have been anything from SATOP codes to intel to DARPA stuff to budget reports.”
“And you keep non-CMAFS files, too?”
“We have secure NSA servers,” Huston said. “But not even I know what’s in them. All we do there is dust and polish.”
“So Escavedo didn’t have access either?”
“No way,” Huston said.
“May I ask why she was transferred? With all her awards and the NCO of the Year thing, I’d think she’d be the kind of person you’d want to keep around.”
“She was,” Huston said. “She asked to be transferred. The first time she asked, she was denied, but when she asked again, we tried to accommodate her. Working inside The Mountain gets to some people. We want to keep qualified personnel, but we also like to keep a supply of fresh faces flowing through, just to avoid stagnation.”
“Why MEPS? That seems like a step down.”
“She wanted to be in Albuquerque, as I recall,” Huston said. “She had friends there, or family. I’m not sure.”
“What did you do when you suspected files had been copied? You reported the missing files—then what happened?”
“I believe CID in Albuquerque asked her to come in,” Huston said. “It wasn’t handled properly. I’m not saying she was spying or stealing anything, but if someone is doing that, you don’t set up an appointment for them to come in and confess, do you? When they went to get her, she was gone. Her laptop was missing, but she forgot to clear her printer buffer, so we were able to print a copy of the last document she’d written.”
He reached behind him and handed DeLuca a piece of paper from a manila folder, a letter printed on plain white paper. It was addressed to a Dr. Burgess, at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It said:
Dear Dr. Burgess,
I was hoping that we could meet in person. I’ve been working for several years at the Cheyenne Mountain facility in Colorado Springs, and I have information I think you might be interested in. I will try calling you again, but I’ll be hard to reach so I’ll have to call you. I look forward to speaking with you.
“Who’s Dr. Burgess?” DeLuca asked.
“Dr. Penelope Burgess,” Major Huston said. “She’s a microbiologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A frequent speaker on the dangers of weaponizing space. She says she never heard of Cheryl Escavedo or received any letters. That’s all I know. Apparently the military police have talked to her. And as far as I know, the next thing they did was call you. Is that right? And that’s really about all I know.”
“Can I keep this?” DeLuca asked.
“It’s yours,” Huston said.
“Can you show me where she worked?”
Huston led him to a corner cubicle in a large room full of cubicles, computers, servers, and storage units. There were two desks in the cubicle, one empty, the other occupied by a lieutenant named Joyce Reznick, who Huston said had worked with Cheryl Escavedo for the last few months that she’d been stationed at Cheyenne Mountain. Huston introduced DeLuca as being from CI and told Reznick to answer any questions he asked. At the same time, instead of leaving them alone, Huston stood looking over DeLuca’s shoulder. DeLuca considered asking him to leave but changed his mind.
“Would you say you knew her fairly well?” DeLuca asked the lieutenant. “Did you socialize in your off hours?”
“We’d meet up at birthday parties and that sort of thing,” Reznick said. “I’m not sure I’d say we were close, but I guess I knew her. A little bit.”
“And she had friends in Albuquerque?” DeLuca said. “That was why she transferred?”
“I guess,” Reznick said.
“Do you know where the rest of her family is?”
“Her parents died in a car accident when she was young,” Reznick said. “She was raised by her uncle. He lives in Las Vegas, I think.”
“Did she have any money problems, that you knew of?”
“CID already asked me that,” Reznick said. “I didn’t know about anything. I know she hated gambling. And she didn’t drink or do anything like that. She was a really good person.”
“How about boyfriends?” DeLuca asked. “Was she ever engaged? Seeing anybody?”
“I don’t know about that,” Reznick said. “She worked all the time. I think she was seeing an older man for a while but it didn’t work out.”
“What makes you say that? Did she say anything specific?”
Reznick shook her head.
“She was very private about that sort of thing,” Reznick said.
“What makes you think it was an older man?”
“I don’t know. That’s just the impression I had. I think one weekend she said she and her friend went skiing and that he had a house. I guess I just assumed anybody who had a house had to be older.”
“Do you remember where they might have gone skiing?”
Reznick shook her head.
“Thanks for your help,” DeLuca said, handing her his card and writing the number of his SATphone on the back of it. “Will you be sure to call me if you think of anything? Major Huston—would that be all right?”
“Certainly,” Huston said. “Not a problem.”
Not a problem, unless you knew all your keystrokes were being twinned and scanned by a surveillance program, and your phone was probably tapped, and your activities were being watched as well.
DeLuca had been met again by Sergeant Davies, who asked him if he was finding his way around and if he wanted to grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria. He declined. She left him with a group of impatient people waiting for the bus to the parking lot and checking their watches. It was still snowing outside, the sky an opaque gray. He’d gone about halfway to his car when he heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Lieutenant Joyce Reznick, hurrying to catch up with him.
“Will you walk with me?” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “I could get in big trouble if anybody knew I was talking to you.”
“Not from me, you can’t,” DeLuca said. “I can protect you if you need protection. I have close friends in very high places.”
“Not high enough,” she said. “Cheryl didn’t want to be transferred. They made her leave. Do you really think she’d prefer processing new recruits in Albuquerque to working here? And don’t let Major Huston tell you how much he loved Cheryl—he thought she’d only gotten to where she was because the Army needed to have a Native American on the program. He called her a pagan once, to her face.”
“I appreciate you telling me this,” DeLuca said.
“I think they wanted to shut her up,” Reznick said. “I think she’d found out about something they didn’t want her to know.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“I don’t know,” Reznick said. “And I don’t know about the boyfriend stuff. I couldn’t tell you this inside, but she told me she was gay. At least she let on that way to other people because there were so many men trying to ask her out that she had to do something to make them leave her alone. Though in the military, you can’t come right out and say you’re gay—don’t ask and don’t tell. Don’t ask for your rights and don’t tell anybody when they’ve been abridged.”
“Why did she tell you, then?” DeLuca asked. “It’s all right, I promise you. Any conversation you have with me is completely protected.”
“So you think,” she said. Her paranoia was palpable. “She told me because I’m gay. And now that I’ve told you, I could be court-martialed. I’ll just have to trust you.”
“What men?” DeLuca asked. “Who was interested in her?”
“Who wasn’t?” Reznick said. “The Mountain is a pretty catty place, though the official term for it is ‘close-knit community.’ You hear rumors all the time.”
“Rumors?” DeLuca said. “About what? Or who?”
“That she was having an affair, with a married officer,” Reznick said. “But you hear things like that about everybody. I heard that about me. And frankly, when I did, I let it spread because it meant people were more likely to believe my partner was just my roommate.”
“So you think Cheryl talking about a boyfriend was just a cover story?” DeLuca said.
“I don’t know,” Reznick said. “Either that or pretending she was gay was a cover story. I can usually tell, and if you ask me, I don’t think she was. Gay.”
“Why do you think she took the files?” he asked. “Assuming she took them.”
“I don’t know,” Reznick said, “but knowing Cheryl, I’m sure she had to have had a very good reason. She loved this country … Colonel…”
“Agent DeLuca,” he told her.
“She loved it more than anybody I’ve ever known. And she considered herself one of the original owners. But she loved what the military had done for her, too. It had given her everything. She would never betray it. I know that. That’s all I can say. I have to go now.”
He considered her words as he started his car. He wondered if he wanted to drive to Albuquerque tonight or wait for the storm to pass—he’d wait to see what the conditions were like, once he got down the mountain.
In the Shijingshan district of Beijing, Wu Xiake leaned out the window of the men’s toilet and took one last drag on his cigarette before flicking the butt into the river below. Some day, he half-expected to flick a cigarette butt into the Yongding and watch the entire river catch fire, such was the level of pollutants and chemicals in the water. He’d gone to an illegal Website one night and read a story about how the massive levels of pollution resulting from the recent Chinese economic revolution were destroying the earth’s environment at a dramatic rate, and how Chinese pesticides entering the river traveled from there to Bo Hai Bay and the Gulf of China and then the Yellow Sea and the Pacific Ocean and ended up in the Arctic Circle and ultimately in the fatty tissues of polar bears, where they acted like artificial estrogens that were making the polar bears gay. Wu Xiake had other things to worry about, besides gay polar bears.
He cursed, then returned to his cubicle. In the next cubicle, his friend Cui Chen was working on his desktop computer, moving frame by frame through the first half of the new movie that had streamed in that afternoon over the Internet from their friends in America, an action thriller starring Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman. At least this time, whoever had sneaked the digital camera into the theater to copy the film had held the camera steady. The last film that Wu had worked on, the bootlegger had coughed loudly every few minutes. Cui’s job was to translate the first half of the new film into Mandarin for subtitles. Wu’s job was the translate the second half, but the Boss wanted it done overnight, and Wu had had very little sleep the night before. If there was another job available to him, he’d take it, but at sixty-six years of age, who would take him? He’d once been one of the top English-to-Mandarin dubbers in the business, the voice of actors ranging from Paul Newman to Curly of The Three Stooges, with the best “nyuk nyuk nyuk” that anybody had ever heard, but now with DVDs, speed was of the essence, and nobody wanted dubbers anymore. It was much faster to go with subtitles. Everything was so hurried. His knowledge of English had gotten him this job, but he felt it was only a matter of time before the Boss got rid of him.
“Did you solve the problem?” Cui asked him in Mandarin without looking up from his computer screen.
“I can’t do it. It is too idiomatic. I was thinking about it, but it makes no sense to me,” Wu admitted.
“Tell me again what the lines are,” Cui offered. “Maybe I can help.”
“Bruce Willis says to Uma Thurman, ‘You wouldn’t be the one waiting for Mr. Right, would you, because Mister Right left.’ And she says, ‘You look like Mister Wrong to me. Your mama must have done a number on you.’ And he says, “If that’s what you want, I don’t want to be right,’ and she says, ‘You know what they say about two wrongs.’ And then he says, ‘You have the right to remain silent, but I haven’t met a woman yet who I couldn’t make scream.’”
“Scream?”
“Yes. Scream.”
“This makes no sense at all, Wu,” Cui said.
“Who is screaming, and what is she screaming about? Is she in pain?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they say about two wrongs?”
“Two wrongs are better than three but worse than one?”
“Possibly.”
“Just do the best you can,” Cui said. “Much of this is not knowable. If the Boss questions you, I will tell him you are right and he is wrong.”
Wu appreciated Cui’s offer of support, but he knew that if it came to where the Boss was going to be hard on them, Cui would capitulate instantly. He sat down at his computer screen and typed in the best translation he could come up with in the time given him.
“You are not the person who I thought was once here pending the arrival of the white man. And anyway, he is gone,” Bruce Willis said.
“And yet you very much resemble he who isn’t that person or any other,” Uma Thurman replied, “and he is not white. Surely your mother was forced to write a number upon you.”
“If it were up to me, I would rather go away now,” Willis said.
“They say when you are wrong twice, that is bad, and this you know,” the actress replied.
“Even if you choose to say nothing, the thing you do not say will be loud. You may yell now.”
“Did you finish?” Cui asked. Wu sighed.
“I did my best. If I’m lucky, everyone will be too busy looking at Uma Thurman to read the subtitles,”Wu Xiake said, adding, in English, “Why soitenly—nyuk nyuk nyuk…”
“I wish my wife had breasts like hers,” Cui said. “They were like that when my wife was nursing our daughter, but she wouldn’t let me touch them. Like Hong Kong. Very appealing, but what difference does it make if you’re not allowed to go there?”
Wu Xiake had just moved on to the next scene when he heard a noise, a low rumbling that sounded like a locomotive was crashing through the building. The noise grew louder and the building shook, until he was certain that an earthquake had struck. He crawled under his desk, where Cui joined him as the power went out in the building and they were engulfed in darkness and dust. He coughed. It was hard to breathe. “Cui?” he called out. He was fortunate in that he still had the headlamp his wife had bought him for his birthday, to wear when he had to ride his bicycle home in the darkness, and the light was strong and the batteries were fresh. He turned it on, but the room was full of dust and smoke. Cui was crying, so Wu did what he could to comfort his friend. The noise lasted for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, and then the building was still again. Cui was shaking. Wu held his friend.
“We must get out,” Wu said. “There could be aftershocks. Are you hurt?”
“No, I think I’m okay.”
“Follow me, Cui.”
Wu put his headlamp on his head and made his way through the darkness, crawling over fallen file cabinets and shelves. In the hall, they found Ji Jiabao, the cleaning lady, trapped under her cart, so they lifted it off her and helped her to her feet. She seemed to be okay. As far as they knew, they were the only ones in their part of the building. A night watchman was supposed to make the rounds, but he was usually in the warehouse, watching movies.
When they got to the end of the corridor, Wu Xiake opened the double doors and stopped, because that was where the building stopped. He saw only flame and smoke and the stars in the open sky above, and below, a pile of rubble where the warehouse had once been, a part of the old converted factory once the size of several soccer fields now simply gone, and with it, millions of yuan worth of copied DVDs waiting for shipment. The earthquake had destroyed Shijingshan Entertainment, and yet, when Wu looked across the river, he saw that the old two-hundred-foot-tall brick chimney from the coal-burning power plant was still belching smoke—how could the earthquake demolish the warehouse but not knock down the chimney?
By the time Wu reached his bicycle, the building was surrounded by fire trucks and policemen and people manning manual pumps to bring water from the river to pour onto the smoldering rubble. He probably should have stayed to help, Wu thought, but he was just tired and wanted to go home. Yet looking back at the building, he couldn’t help noting how odd it was—it was as if somebody had taken a large knife and sliced the building neatly in half in a straight line. Perhaps that was where the fault line of the earthquake lay, and yet, none of the other buildings in the neighborhood had been touched or damaged in any way. The night watchman was the only casualty.
“You don’t think the Boss is going to blame us for this, do you, Wu?” Cui asked.
“I don’t know,” Wu said, worried. “He might.”
“You have to tell him that I was working at my desk when it happened,” Cui said. “You have to tell him we are innocent.”
“Don’t worry,” Wu said, “I’ll tell him,” though he didn’t plan on going back to work any time soon.