Authors: David DeBatto
“Like VMI.”
“I guess,” Ford said. “Anyway, that’s where he was when he heard his old man had killed himself. After the way the Navy treated
his old man, which was actually a lot fairer than his grandfather ever treated anybody, he switched to West Point and graduated
first in his class. Supposedly he’s got a wicked high IQ. Anyway, from there on, his record gets a bit murky. He was ordered
to get counseling at West Point but there’s no record of who he saw or why. His official 201 doesn’t mention it. One of his
classmates I spoke to said he probably had an anger management problem because of a couple of fights he was in. He said the
chip on the guy’s shoulder wouldn’t fit under his uniform. My kids sifted through a whole bunch of stuff and found his name
on a few documents and so on. We’re trying to piece together a time line. He made major at the Pentagon, 1979, working at
the DIA, mostly in Iran, and colonel when they posted him to be the military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Berlin, 1980-82,
then Moscow, 1982-88, where his job was to debug the building and make the computer system there 100 percent secure. You can
probably imagine what that involved, with encryption codes and protocols and whatnot, but what they tell me is that he didn’t
just lead the team—he made himself into a first-class software engineer. Microsoft offered him a job as vice president and
a pile of dough but he turned them down. He went from Moscow to NATO and tried to get a combat command during Gulf One, but
I gather by then they had him labeled a techie, so he didn’t get it. I talked to a woman who worked in the secretarial pool
for him who said he was not at all happy about that. Then Space Command and then STRATCOM, first in Nebraska at Offutt and
then at Cheyenne. The details are in the report.”
“What’s your gut say about him?” DeLuca asked.
“My gut says he’s still got a chip on his shoulder bigger than the mountain he works in,” Ford replied. “Over the years, there’ve
been four campaigns, letter writing and lobbying the secretary of the Navy and so on, to get a ship named after his grandfather,
and two to have the charges against his father reversed. The general himself isn’t connected to any of them, because that
would be unseemly—you’re supposed to grab your ankles and take it like a man—but if you dig a little deeper, you find they
were all started by guys Koenig went to prep school with. What are the odds of that? You know he put ’em up to it.”
“Could you get me a list of all his classmates?” DeLuca said.
“Can do,” Ford said. “Want to know about your Major Brent Huston?”
“Sure,” DeLuca said. “I’ve already got the ultraconservative Baptist part, if you want to skip that.”
“I don’t know if you’ve got it in full,” Ford said. “Like for instance, when he was eleven years old, he was the victim of
an exorcism. Or not the victim—the beneficiary, I guess. His parents thought he had demons. Turned out he was having epileptic
seizures, but they insisted it was demons.”
“Did they stop?”
“I don’t know,” Ford said. “They stopped talking about it. The Army put him on antiseizure meds. He originally wanted to go
Air Force but the seizures disqualified him from ever flying in anything. He met Koenig in Moscow, and followed him to NATO
and then STRATCOM. The other weird thing was that when he was in Nebraska, he asked a junior officer if he’d care to come
to church with him to worship, and the guy was Jewish, from New York, but he figured he’d score a few points and humor the
boss, so he went, and Huston started speaking in tongues. I guess he was trying to convert the Jew or something, make a big
impression on him, but the Jewish guy wrote up a report that Huston had lost his mind, and there were other officers who didn’t
care for Huston’s holier-than-thou attitude who tried to get him chaptered out on a psych charge, until Koenig himself stepped
in and went to bat for him.”
“And he was doing the same work as Koenig?” DeLuca said.
“Computer security,” Ford said. “Cracking the God Paradox, aptly enough.”
“Which is?”
“Can God create a problem bigger than He Himself can solve?” Ford said. “In human terms, the question is, is the mind capable
of creating a code that it can’t itself crack, because until it does, you’re never going to get complete security. I read
a report that said Koenig’s team solved it, with random number generators and things like that. Of course, you still have
the Brink’s problem.”
“Which is?”
“Most armored cars get robbed from the inside,” Ford said. “A security code is only as good as the people who write it. Somebody
could always put in a trap door or a Trojan horse or a time bomb or an event portal of some kind, same way a locksmith can
always make himself an extra set of keys. The way around that is to use more than one locksmith. Divide it up, get three or
four teams to each write a discrete part of the code, and no one team knows what the other teams are doing. Your General Koenig
didn’t do that because he wanted it all under one roof. His.”
“And?”
“Maybe it’s nothing. It’s just that most security codes set up firewalls to stop people from outside getting in. There are
internal surveillance programs, but, you know, there are ways around everything. You can disable the surveillance once you’re
in, but if you start out already inside the firewall, you can work behind the wall. Or you set it up to keep sending false
positives while you go about your business. A lot of things can happen once the barbarians are inside the gates. You can run
a doubler program that says you’re in one place when you’re in another, cyberspace-wise. Any number of things. There’s a printout
I put together for my computer fraud class that I included in what I sent you.”
“I appreciate it,” DeLuca said. “Did you turn this into another class assignment?”
“Naw, but I asked a couple of graduate students to check into it,” Ford said. “I came up with another connection you might
be interested in.”
“Which is?”
“I ran the name Leon Lev through the system, but all SIPERNET gave me was ties to some Albanian hoods running a bunch of Italian
restaurants in New York City, so I called our friend Mike O’Leary at the Bureau. He said there was a KGB goon named Leon Lev
who worked out of the Moscow directorate in the eighties. Remember that Marine guard at the U.S. embassy who got caught bonking
a Russian woman who turned out to be a spy, back in 1984? Lev was the guy who hooked them up. They used to call that a ‘honey
trap.’ I don’t know if that’s what they still call it, but apparently that was his job, and his boss was Vitaly Sergelin.”
“The Russian oil bazillionaire?”
“Now, but then, he was one of the top guys in the KGB. A colonel. He and Putin were like Hope and Crosby, and his whole deal
was trying to crack the U.S. embassy.”
“So he and Koenig would have known each other,” DeLuca said.
“I don’t know if they
knew
each other, but they would have known
of
each other,” Ford said. “After perestroika and all that, when the Soviet Union fell apart and there was a big scramble to
privatize what used to be industries controlled by the state, there was a major power grab for the oil business, and Sergelin
came out on top, but not without a number of horseheads in the beds and various people not-so-mysteriously disappearing, and
O’Leary said Lev was Sergelin’s main boy, until he had to more or less split town when he started leaving too many bodies
around. O’Leary said they lost track of Lev after 1996 or so. Do you know what he’s doing now?”
“Apparently he owns a number of whorehouses in Juarez,” DeLuca said.
“Well,” Ford said, “you know what they say about the cream rising to the top.”
“Or the scum sinking to the bottom,” DeLuca said.
“Scum would actually be on the top, too,” Ford said. “Sludge would sink to the bottom.”
“That must be why it’s so hard to tell the cream and the scum apart,” DeLuca conceded.
DeLuca wondered if it was purely a coincidence when, half an hour later, his phone rang.
“Lieutenant Carr calling for General Koenig—will you hold?” the voice on the phone said. Nothing about, “Are you in the middle
of something right now?” But then, generals rarely asked if they were interrupting anything. Something about Carr had rubbed
him the wrong way from the first time he’d met him at Cheyenne Mountain. He’d struck Dan Sykes the wrong way, too, literally,
defeating him at an intraservice full-contact karate tournament a year earlier when Dan had failed to wipe the sanctimonious
smirk off Carr’s face, too eager, Sykes admitted, for the opportunity to hit an officer. DeLuca waited. When Koenig came on
the line, his tone was oddly solicitous.
“Agent DeLuca,” he said. “Glad I caught you. I had a briefing with General LeDoux.
Er sagt daß Sie pflegten in Deutschland als Übersetzer zu arbeiten.”
“Not exactly as a translator,” DeLuca said. “We worked at a listening station on the border. Near Mannheim. You were in Berlin,
as I understand.”
“Es war alles soviel einfachere, als wir wußten, wem der Feind war und wo er lebte, nicht war?”
“It was all so much simpler when we knew who the enemy was and where he lived, wasn’t it?” the general had asked. “Listen,
I wanted to hear where you are with this. As you now understand, there were things I wasn’t permitted to speak to you about
when we met at The Mountain. Now that you’re read on, I wanted to follow up and see if there was anything else you needed
to ask me.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” DeLuca said. The question was, did Koenig want to give DeLuca information, or was he trying to get
information from DeLuca? Counterintelligence agents were the only members of the military permitted by the Army’s own justice
code to mislead or lie to a superior officer as part of an investigation, which was part of why officers hated talking to
CI agents. It was DeLuca’s understanding that he was under no obligation to keep Koenig informed, no matter how much interest
Koenig showed. His reports went to LeDoux, who was free to disseminate them however he chose. It was possible that Koenig’s
offer was to be taken at face value. It was also possible that a game of chess had begun, and it was DeLuca’s move.
“I do have some questions,” DeLuca said. “My first would be what information you think Sergeant Escavedo might have copied.
You said before that she might have been taking work home. I gather you don’t think that now. Colonel Oswald said there was
Darkstar data that was accidentally archived. Who was responsible for that?”
“Unfortunately,” Koenig said, “no one was responsible, unless you want to blame the people who wrote the program that automatically
sorted the data for storage, in which case, since I headed the unit that wrote the codes, I’m responsible. I’m not going to
make a scapegoat out of anybody who worked for me, Agent DeLuca. If you need to put that in your report, please feel free
to do so.”
“I don’t see where that’s going to be necessary,” DeLuca said. “So it was an automated data dump that she caught—did she catch
it
because
it was in error?”
“We think so,” Koenig said. “Major Huston tells me she probably found the file and thought, ‘What’s this doing here?’ And
then looked in it, like any good soldier would. The mistake was where it was sent, because apparently it hadn’t been encoded
properly. She shouldn’t have been able to open the file.”
“And what was in it?”
“Well,” Koenig said, “we’re not entirely sure, other than that it had been sealed in October of 1990, so it wouldn’t have
been anything terribly current. We think it might have been the specs on a prototype we were test-bedding that actually never
worked, so the danger of that leaking could be described as minimal. That specific data. But the fact of the program itself
is one we’re still shutting down. My fear, and Major Huston’s, is that Sergeant Escavedo may have had some contact with former
Soviet assets.”
Again, DeLuca wanted to take the general’s statement at face value. At the same time, one of the most obvious tells, interrogating
a suspect, was when the suspect tried to cast suspicion on someone else. People who were truly innocent rarely had any idea
who might be guilty, whereas people who were guilty always had a reason to divert suspicion.
“Were you aware that Sergeant Escavedo had a Russian roommate?” Koenig said. “A woman of questionable virtue, as they were
once described.”
“I was aware of that,” DeLuca said, wondering if he should be admitting as much. “They met through a sign posted on a laundromat
wall, apparently.”
“And you believe that?” Koenig said.
“I’m looking into it,” DeLuca said. “Why was Escavedo transferred to the MEPS center in Albuquerque? Up to that point her
service record appeared to be outstanding.”
“Two reasons,” Koenig said. “According to Major Huston, he was afraid Sergeant Escavedo was developing a drinking problem.
He’d found an empty bottle of vodka in her desk. We have zero tolerance for substance abuse at CMAF. The other reason was
the rumors surrounding her about her sexuality. My personal opinions about don’t-ask/don’t-tell are irrelevant here, by the
way. As you’ve seen from the photographs, Sergeant Escavedo was an attractive human being. When some of the men in The Mountain
learned that she was gay, they expressed a great degree of discomfort, working with her. You can sit there and tell me that
they weren’t mature or politically correct or whatever you want, but things inside The Mountain are different from things
outside The Mountain. If it was Lackland or Kirtland or Peterson or anywhere else where people didn’t work in such close quarters,
it might not have made a bit of difference. The mentality inside The Mountain is more like a submarine than anything else.
Discomfort means people can’t do their jobs. We just lost a lieutenant named Reznick who decided to make an issue of it—what
people do with their private lives is their business and none of mine, but when it compromises the security of this nation
by causing problems at STRATCOM, we put a stop to it. They can resolve these things however they want, in the courts or in
the media, that’s up to them, but inside The Mountain, anything that compromises efficiency has to be dealt with promptly.”