Midnight Empire (3 page)

The consequence of the design was, theoretically, a flawlessly secure communications platform. But the technology was still preliminary and was yet to be proved at scale. Four weeks ago, Daniel had attended a meeting with Michael Sett, a gaunt astrophysicist-cum-businessman whose daughters were champion hockey players, the eldest on scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport. ‘There's a general at the Pentagon,' Sett said. ‘He's an old Cold War cryptanalyst named Arthur Bradley and it's my feeling that he understands us on a deep level, Daniel. For someone like Bradley, you can see how LinkLock might be a revelation. We're the end game, and I think that would be a satisfying thing for an old general, to witness the closing of his field, to put the conclusion into motion. Think of the quiet hours he's put in over the decades, the slow afternoons working in codes and cyphers, sessions in his safe room at home after taking his family to church, a working lifetime of deep mathematics and wells of subterranean secrets, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, whoever else. And now here we are. Quantum cryptography, a serious thing to someone like Bradley. These intelligence men, when they retire, go completely cut out. They box the photos on their desks and hand over their passes and go cold turkey. They go fishing and watch the mists rise off cold American lakes. So I see why he wants to help us. If we succeed, he doesn't die wondering. If he helps us he brings the codes, his life's work, more or less to an end.'

Daniel woke to the glow of the Strip, gold, blue and green, arterial lights in a sweep of unnatural density, and he stood in the window and looked out, half impressed, half asleep.

The sound of an air conditioner somewhere in the loft but otherwise just the simple silence of a high-rise. He'd overslept. It was time to explore. This was his first visit to America, and he changed into blue jeans and a T-shirt and loaded his wallet with a one-hundred-dollar bill.

The first thing was the heat, still there after dark, a powerful radiation off the pavement, off the Nexus building's walls. The tourist guide called it dry heat—it was like the heat of a furnace. He walked west, towards the Strip, past six-storey parking lots and past dumpsters and mini-bins, hearing traces of Spanish, calls and jeers, then a car's horn and a far siren and finally the noise of the crowd as he came to the intersection of Harmon Avenue and the Boulevard, facing the Aria Resort. There he joined the swell, people fenced from the road by a barrier, heading towards the Miracle Mile.

A bearded man with a placard: SINNERS DONT DRINK DONT GAMBLE FIND JESUS IN THESE LAST DAYS. Then five men, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM on red and yellow T-shirts, handing cards into the crowd, flicking them quick-snap with their fingers.

He hadn't thought that the city would be this expansive. Even the near towers and lights seemed far apart, walkways rising above the roads, people in shorts stepping at a sedate pace or pausing to take photos. Already he couldn't help but think how unreal it was, how purely human. You only had to look to know this was a city floated on tides, a true contingency, a destination in utter flux.

He ate at a restaurant inside the Miracle Mile, a shopping centre that housed a Persian sky, a hard blue dusk that was an effect of sculpting and light, shopfronts meant to make him feel as if he were where? Istanbul? Damascus? Lebanon? Someplace sometime in the middle age of the Middle East.

When his call connected, Hannah's voice seemed distant, scratchy and long-wired, as if this was a call placed years ago, in another era, when international telephony had analogue designs.

‘Bad line,' she commented.

‘I can hear you, only just.'

He pictured her in the kitchen, leaning against the bench, the phone in her right hand, her long brown hair in the ponytail she wore to the gym.

‘What's it like?' she asked.

He mentioned the lights and the loft. The city in the middle of the desert.

‘What about the people?'

‘The people?'

‘How do they seem?'

‘I don't know yet. I don't think I've met anyone really.'

They talked about small things: a dying battery in the TV remote; the whereabouts of the car's spare key. It might have been comforting had Daniel not known it was coming, the question of why he'd gone.

‘No second thoughts then?' Hannah eventually said.

‘No,' he said.

‘I know it makes you mad to be asked.'

‘It doesn't.'

‘I'm just trying to make sure that you know what you're doing.'

‘We've talked about this,' he said.

‘We've talked about it.'

‘I don't want to be apart from you.'

‘But you're doing it. You're on your adventure.'

‘It's my job, Hannah.'

‘Your job.' There was an edge to her voice. ‘That isn't a good reason. I just want to be sure that you've considered what it means,
why
it's right, what you are about to do.'

While he liked to pretend otherwise, he knew they weren't doing well. There were arguments (even if they didn't want to argue) and at times they resented one another's company.

This was what he thought: that four years was simply a long time to spend together, that a certain amount of turbulence, of distance, was inevitable. If that was true, then they would survive. Or if something vital had gone wrong, or had been wrong from the beginning, then it wouldn't be fixed.

He thought his coming here could be part of the plan. Put a little space between them, enough to allow them to reconfigure themselves, to grow a little, to re-form at a distance. Hannah had once said that when they met they'd been different people from who they were now. That was true enough. One of the things that he'd so far learned about life was that if you gave yourself four or five years you would be embarrassed by your former self, by your naivety, your cluelessness, by how you had behaved, what you had thought about the way things were.

He and Hannah had met when she was eighteen and he was twenty, met again when she was twenty and he twenty-two, and had gone out with each other since. He'd tutored her in Astrophysics 1 at ANU: a lightweight subject targeting the university's first-year cohort, explaining the mysteries of the universe (with pictures) and taught by almost any third-year student who applied. She was an arts student, majoring in literature. She wore clothing that was a mystery to him: bright-coloured articles that he would never have been able to name. She was herself a mystery. He would watch her, study her carefully as the situation allowed, only to lose all sense of her afterwards, left with bare impressions, such as that she had brown hair. He'd thought in that Friday afternoon class that, inexplicably, she might have liked him, but he'd been too hopeless to do anything about it. It wasn't until a party in Narrabundah, two years later, that their paths crossed again. And, as this time he was drunk, he'd had courage enough to talk to her, courage enough, even, to walk her home and to kiss her. He had been intoxicated by her then, cringeworthily so. She was beautiful. And smart. The idea that a smart and beautiful girl might one day want him had seemed a fantasy. But with Hannah, it had somehow happened, and he had never been so elated, so in love to the point of sickness. He went through every cliché, buying her gifts he couldn't afford and doing things he could never before have imagined, including a weekend trip to Byron Bay. Daniel walked Canberra's streets and the university's grounds unable to believe his luck. They were delighted by each other. They were a team. She wanted him in her bed, and that was the best surprise of all.

He'd never been happier. But all that now seemed long ago.

In the morning, a hand delivery. A white cardboard box with his name on it. Inside, a BlackBerry with a note:
Daniel, this phone has a Creech address for you, secure email. Expect a call this morning. Jake.

He took a shower and had to fumble with wet hands when the call came.

‘Daniel. Jake.'

‘Hello, Jake.'

‘Sorry I haven't been to visit. We're busy with new pilots and there's only two of us in the office. You've settled in? Listen, your interview is booked for eleven o'clock tomorrow. It's taken some organising because it's CIA. Don't worry about it—you're Australian so it'll be routine. Then we'll get you out here. Your boxes have arrived. I've got them in a locker. You're all set there?'

‘All set.'

‘Alright. Good man.'

He ate that evening at a café inside Planet Hollywood, watching people play the slots. The casino floor was cavernous, a roof three levels high, a cinema and nightclubs on the second and third floors. Huge images of movie stars. Huge images of people playing craps. The bacon in his burger was inedible and the bread almost so. He ordered a Budweiser in part just to say the word.

He thought about finding something nice for Hannah that he could quickly send home. He'd expected there wouldn't be anything very tasteful to buy in Las Vegas but after an hour's search he was still surprised that he hadn't been able to find anything that wasn't gruesome. Finally, in a store called City Style, he discovered a summer dress that he thought would fit and was nice enough, and he bought it on credit before realising that, in the habit, he'd accidently used the company's card.

He had the store reverse the charge but already he could see the item being highlighted in yellow by one of LinkLock's three accountants before being shown to the CFO. LinkLock was a serious place, and the idea of Daniel Carter, deep in the heart of the American war machine, buying a summer dress wasn't likely to go down well.

Annoyed by his thoughtlessness, he walked back towards the Nexus building at pace, weaving through the crowd on the Strip, the heat thick and the lights hard and an endless flow of tourists going both ways, discussing shows and restaurants, the opposite sex and hotels.

A human statue shouted
Boo
as Daniel went by, startling him, and he felt a wave of adrenaline like acid in his blood. He kept going, cutting through the crowd, and not far on he felt someone point him out, a group of men in his peripheral vision. He turned and was certain that all four were looking at him, locals perched on the street barricade, marking him as a target; a thin male tourist with a shopping bag that might contain consumer electronics.

Now he noticed that one man was on the phone, and it seemed possible that he was calling ahead, communicating with an associate or group of associates further down the boulevard:
Soft touch headed your way
.

So Daniel turned left, went in through the open doors of what happened to be the Casino Royale, a circus-themed slot joint fronting the street, and onto its gambling floor, past the craps and the roulette, going deep, intending to double back onto the street and find another way to the hotel.

Over his shoulder, he thought he saw the man on the phone starting to move. He turned down a row of slot machines to remove himself from view. Was he reading this right, or was it a case of nothing between the lines? Right then it didn't matter, only that he was getting away.

He came back to the street further up the boulevard, took the first cross street away from the throng, walked into the zone of car parks and air-conditioning towers and traffic. Ten minutes later, he came to the door of his building, passkey in hand, and only when the loft's door clicked behind him did he realise that the dress, the shopping bag, was no longer in his hand.

The next morning, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he needed to sharpen his mind. He'd set his alarm for 5.30 a.m. so that he could witness a desert sunrise. He decided to run, get some exercise.

He went east in the pre-dawn. The city looked fresh, quiet and clean. Long, cold shadows out of the hills, streetlights still shining, and soon he came to a suburb, cars facing pale streets, small houses in scattered lines, palm trees rising from a few front yards.

The air was pure and his feet beat down. He took intersections randomly, jogged by garbage cans and children's bicycles flopped sideways and a hula hoop in the middle of the road. There was the wire-hum of the power lines overhead. Not much activity on the streets—a few vans, a woman walking a dog, lights in the occasional kitchen, a man in a singlet staring into the dim.

When the sun broke the crest of the hill he felt its warm light on his face. He started to feel a burn in his legs. Cars went by but on the streets there was hardly a soul.

He crossed motorways and came to T-intersections and ventured down cul-de-sacs. He focused on his body, on a clarity of mind. The sky turned from darkest blue to light. A dog snarled at him through a fence while a child's voice playfully called its name.

Secular confessions. The idea of meeting the CIA made him uneasy. He didn't understand why they wanted to interview him. He'd already been cleared top secret by the Australian Government, and the American DoD had informed LinkLock that that would be enough.

He changed into a collared shirt and checked the adequacy of his shave.

John Henderson buzzed at a minute past eleven, a man in his fifties with a moustache and wiry eyebrows, bifocals and a fair gut; sweaty. They sat at the lounge setting, Henderson with his briefcase open on the coffee table.

‘Australia,' he said. ‘Now why would you leave it?'

‘Foolish, I suppose.'

‘What age are you?'

‘Twenty-six.'

‘At twenty-six I was half as dumb. Are you married?'

‘Girlfriend.'

‘Burning the home fires?'

‘In Canberra.'

‘You're an engineer?'

‘Communications.'

‘Networks.'

‘That's right.'

‘So why am I here? You're Australian and you're technical. Should be a free pass.'

‘I don't know.'

‘What will you be doing at Creech?'

‘Encryption.'

‘Boring.'