Authors: Nathan Goodman
32
“The NSA will never be able to crack a CIA-level encryption algorithm in a matter of hours. And besides—” said Stark. But the director cut him off.
“Wait a minute. Even if the NSA can’t crack the code in time, based on what Agent MacKerron here is saying, we still might be able to find out which e-mail addresses belong to terrorists. Don’t you get it? Maybe from there we can track down where those people open their e-mails. I’m going to get on the horn to the NSA myself and keep it quiet. I’ve got a contact over there that I trust. I don’t want the CIA to get wind of this from anyone, including the NSA. And get a tech team in here right now. I want this whole office swept for bugs. This CIA thing is giving me the willies.”
Stark left the room in a hurry, and Director Latent turned back to Jana and Kyle.
“Sir, you’ve got a contact at NSA?” said Jana. “Are you sure you can trust him? I mean, what if . . .”
Latent held up his hand. “Don’t worry, Baker. Uncle Bill and I go way back. All the way to Georgetown. I’d trust him with my life. In fact,” Latent started to laugh, “if anyone ever finds out how many times he held my head over the toilet . . . You two, get back to your witness. Tonight is the night. I don’t care if we don’t have a warrant. We need his help to get in that building and get the data. I’m putting special ops on standby. You’ll have an HRT assault team with you tonight. Pay attention to what they say. Learn from them. You’re both going in that building. It’s time to earn your pay.”
Jana and Kyle looked at one another; the gravity of the situation pulled against them like the tow of a tsunami. They were down the elevator and out the building two minutes later. The springtime air was heavy with steam as they ran across the wet, pollen-washed parking lot. They drove straight to Cade’s apartment. Kyle never felt so exhilarated in his life.
33
It was after seven p.m. when Cade got home. He looked exhausted. Kyle was in the arm chair in the main room of the apartment, but for once, Cade wasn’t happy to see him.
“Aw man, I was afraid you’d be here,” said Cade.
“Well kiss my ass. Who was it that was there to take care of you after you hurled at that homecoming party?” Kyle jabbed, grinning.
“Yeah, yeah. I know you’d do anything for me. You’d bail me out of jail, you’d kill for me, all that fraternity crap, blah, blah, blah,” said Cade.
Cade walked into the kitchen and put down his laptop bag, still not seeing Jana sitting across the room.
“I don’t have anything new yet. They’re watching me like a hawk. My computer is being monitored. I can see the network sniffer on it. If I download any data, they’d know.”
“Oh really? Can’t get the data, huh? Well what if I told you I could get you a date with Jana? I bet you’d suddenly find a way to get the data then, wouldn’t you?” Kyle ribbed, never letting on that Jana was sitting right there. “Admit it, you love her, don’t you? Come on, admit it.”
“How do you . . . aw man, don’t tell her, all right? I mean, shit, a girl like that? I’d never get a date with her. She’s way out of my league. Look, don’t tell her. And I’m not in love with her. I’m just . . . obsessed. You happy now?”
Kyle’s attempt to hold his laughter broke. “Okay, I won’t say a word. Honest.” Laughter burst out of both Kyle and Jana. Cade poked his head around the wall and saw Jana sitting there, gripping her mouth with both hands to stifle herself.
Cade had to laugh at himself. There was nothing left to do; it was too late—he’d already made a fool of himself. “Okay, okay, now I feel like an ass. Are you both happy?” Laughter erupted in the small apartment.
“Cade, all right, all right. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh,” said Jana. “Let’s put the whole thing behind us, okay? But listen, in all seriousness, we need to talk. We brought food. We’ll talk while we eat. We’ve got a lot to do tonight.”
Cade’s face was still flushed. “We do?” He looked at the two of them. “What do we have to do tonight?” Cade held both hands up as if to surrender. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Good God, whatever it is, I don’t think I want to know.”
Kyle and Jana laughed at him, hoping to ease the tension as Cade turned back towards Kyle.
“Cool Mac, okay, there’s something that’s been eating at me. It’s something I didn’t notice at first, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. The other night . . . that night I saw you on TV at the news conference. I called your cell, and you were on the scene of the Montana bombing, right?”
“Yeah?” said Kyle.
“I don’t understand. The bombing happened, what, like an hour beforehand?”
“And?”
“Dude. You live in San Diego. How is it that you were on the scene of a bombing that’s fifteen hundred miles away in less than an hour? And thinking about it, you must have been there much sooner, because your boss knew all the details of what happened, right?”
Kyle paused. “Shit, I knew this would come up . . . I tell you what, let’s take a breather. Let’s eat first, then we’ll talk.”
Jana and Kyle didn’t say anything work related until after all the reheated pizza was cleared from the coffee table. They wanted Cade to relax and decompress. What they were about to tell him was going to wig him out. And if the truth be told, both Kyle and Jana were a bit wigged out themselves.
Jana began, “Cade, what we’re going to tell you is going to be a shock.”
Cade looked at her. She was the sultriest thing he’d ever seen. Whatever she had to tell him, he was going to listen because listening meant he got to look at her without her thinking he was gawking, which he was.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. You work at spook central.”
Cade smiled, glancing back and forth at the two of them. “What? What do you mean? What, like Ghostbusters or something? There are ghosts in my office?”
Jana looked to Kyle. “No. Not those kinds of spooks.”
Cade’s eyes squinted in confusion.
“Spooks. Wait, you mean spies? Those kind of spooks? What are you talking about?” But before Jana could respond, realization took hold of Cade.
Spies. They’re spies. That’s what all the secrecy is about. That’s what the DEFCON 4 fire drills are about. That’s what Rupert Johnston meant when he talked about the seventeenth floor having a special coating on the glass to thwart laser mics from being able to eavesdrop.
“I, I, I . . . they’re spies? Like, real spies?!” Cade was beginning to panic.
“Calm down,” said Jana, sitting on the couch next to him. “But yes, we mean spies . . . Cade, your coworkers are employed by the CIA.”
Cade broke free from the trance of Jana’s deep blue eyes and stood up, knocking hard into the glass top of the coffee table. It slid down to the carpeted floor with a thud.
“Whaaat in the blue FUCK are you talking about?! How could they be CIA?! There’s just . . . there’s no way . . .”
Kyle jumped up and put his hands on Cade’s shoulders. “Look at me. Look at me! There’s nothing we can do about it, Cade. It is what it is. You remember that time in the frat when that dumbass Matt Lumson threw that beer bottle way up in the air? And it landed on Dr. Lick’s car? The president of the damn university? We were screwed, right? The whole frat was put on probation, and we just had to suck on it. It was what it was. There was no way out. It’s like that, man. It is what it is. And now, we have to deal with it. Now, we make our move.”
Jana interrupted. “Kyle. Hold on. Don’t go there yet. Before we tell him our plans, he has to know why. He has to know what’s at stake.”
Jana had a structured way of thinking. A way of compartmentalizing and speed-thinking three sentences ahead of whomever she was talking to.
“What do you mean? What’s at stake?” said Cade.
Kyle exhaled. “Sit down, man. Let’s talk about this thing.”
Cade’s eyes locked on Kyle as he found his seat on the couch again, his left arm feeling behind him like a blind man. He collapsed into the couch, terrified of what they might say next.
Kyle laid out their theory. Thoughtstorm was the nerve center of a communications system for a CIA-sponsored terror cell that was spread out across the United States. After it was over, Cade looked like he was going to be sick.
“You think Thoughtstorm is run by the CIA? You think the CIA is funding terrorists? Funding terrorists so that they can work their way higher and higher up within the terrorist organization until they can bust the whole thing wide open? Are you out of your fucking minds?”
Kyle and Jana said nothing.
Cade’s breathing became erratic. “But in the process, people and kids and moms and shit are dying? Are you kidding me?”
Jana put her hand onto Cade’s shoulder and slid closer to him. “Okay, okay. Let’s lean back. Breathe, Cade, breathe. Relax. Long breaths, in and out. That’s better. It’s a lot to take in, I know. But we’re pretty damn sure we’re right. We lifted a fingerprint from the one you call William Macy.” Agent Baker paused, looking up at Kyle. She knew that by revealing these things she may be breaching national security. But too much was riding on Cade Williams. The clock was ticking, and people were going to die, again.
“I’m not supposed to tell you things like this, Cade,” said Jana. “I could get into trouble. A lot of trouble. But my father drilled one thing into my head that I carry with me every day. He told me to never ever do anything I’m going to regret for the rest of my life.”
Cade looked at her, stunned. He’d heard the exact same phrase from his dad so many times growing up he’d wanted to puke. But now he was starting to understand what his father meant.
“I might get in trouble now, but I’d never be able to live with myself if there was some way for me to stop these assholes from killing again,” she said. “And frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck. I’m not going to sit here and watch it happen. I’m going to stop it, and stop it hard.”
“So what about this fingerprint?” Cade regained some of his composure, and his breathing normalized.
“William Macy’s fingerprint was found in the NCIC database. But access to the identity was blocked by something called the Fourteenth Protocol. When Director Latent saw that, I swear, he turned white as a ghost.”
Kyle spoke up, “None of us even knew what the Fourteenth Protocol was. Latent was the only one in the whole office. That’s how classified it is.”
Then Jana said, “As the stories around the office go, when Latent was a field agent, he was tougher than nails. They said he’d kick your ass if you tried to get in front of him when it was time to breach a door as a raid was about to happen. He doesn’t back down for anything. But, man, this thing scared the shit out of him.”
Cade was ready to learn more and sat up a little. “All right, so what is this protocol thing?”
“It’s apparently one of fifteen executive protocols created after 9/11. I don’t know what the rest of them mean, but the fourteenth corresponds to the CIA. It means William Macy, or whatever his real name is, is a Company man. He works for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“That’s not all that you have to tell me, is it?”
Kyle looked at him out of the side of his eye. “No. No, it’s not.”
“All right, so what else do you have to tell me? What is it you’ve been working up to?”
Kyle walked across the room and stood with his back to Cade, staring at a span of wall where a framed picture would normally hang.
“Montana. You asked me how it was I got from San Diego to Shelby, Montana, in under an hour.” Kyle thought back to that night, to the horrible things he’d seen, sights that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
“I didn’t get from San Diego to Shelby in an hour. I was in a Gulfstream jet an hour before the bomb went off. We were flying around the center of the country, just waiting for it to happen.”
“You were just waiting for it to happen?”
“Remember, Cade, these attacks are timed,” said Kyle. “The bombing in Montana occurred eighteen days after the one in Tucson. We know when they’re going to go off, but we don’t know where.” Kyle was still staring straight ahead. “We were airborne ahead of the attack so we could respond as quickly as possible. When we got onto the scene of that bombing . . . I just . . . I can’t explain how bad it was. It was like being on the surface of the moon. Everything was gray, except for the splattering of red—everything. The dirt, the road, the buildings that were still standing; human remains were everywhere.”
Kyle turned back around to look at Cade, but Cade looked away.
“No, no. I don’t want to hear this, I can’t hear this,” said Cade.
“I have to tell you. You have to know. Otherwise, you won’t understand . . . you won’t understand what we have to do.”
Cade looked up. Jana held her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t imagine the horror of the things Kyle had seen. She now knew that this job, and the things she would see and hear, would mark her for the rest of her life.
Kyle continued, “Like I was saying, there were tiny body parts everywhere, just little fragments. There was one though, one that brought me to my knees. It was a hand. It was a tiny, tiny hand. The child must have only been about a year old. And there at my feet, I looked down. Other than the dirt, it was this perfect little hand. I just fell to my knees and lost it. I wretched like I’ve never wretched in my life. I lost it big time.”
Cade shook his head and placed his hands over his ears.
Kyle grabbed him, hard. “Cade, Cade! Goddammit! Listen to me. Listen! That little hand—it wasn’t just some piece of crime scene evidence. It was a tiny life. A real person. Some kid who never got a chance. I had to fingerprint it. I think Supervisory Special Agent Bolz wanted me to have that experience, to be emotionally tied to the investigation. When we matched the prints with the birth records at the local hospital, it led us to…” Kyle stopped and collected his thoughts. “There’s a set of grandparents who live just south of Shelby who will never see their daughter or little grandchild again. I had to tell them that the only thing we could find of their granddaughter was a . . . a . . .” He stopped, unable to finish his sentence. “Cade, we are three of the only people in the country who can stop it before it happens again. Everyone else is out there, afraid to leave their homes. People are in hiding. They’re taking away our way of life, our whole economy . . .” Kyle was walking the room, his arms flailing as he made his point. “This is not America anymore; they’ve taken that away from us. Goddammit! I need your help. We need your help.” Kyle looked despondent. “The whole damn country needs your help.”
After a long silence, Cade capitulated. “All right, Kyle, all right. Fuck it. I’ve known you forever. Whatever it is, I’m in. What is it we have to do?”
Jana looked to Kyle who had just received a call on his cell. By the look on his face, it was the call they’d been waiting for from HRT. Kyle’s thumbs-up told Jana they had the green light.
Jana said, “You’ve done everything you could to try to get us the data we need. But, it hasn’t worked. We’re going. Tonight.”
“Going where?” said Cade. “My office?” Jana looked at him with no acknowledgement. Cade’s expression went from confusion to resignation. “Oh shit, I knew you were going to say that. Son of a bitch.”