Authors: David DeBatto
“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.