and exploding. That was how it all began...
Cindy glanced at her watch. Nearly 6 pm. Perhaps the atrium would cool down a little once the mid-summer sun was no longer resting on the skylight windows. Unfortunately, the coming night would also mean that the robots would have an easier time tracking anyone still outside; their infrared vision worked better than their normal eyes, someone had explained to her. Probably Dale. He seemed to know a lot about such things.
Almost as if she’d read her mind, Sharon looked up from strapping on her belt. “Oh, by the way … Dale asked me to tell you that he’d like to see you.”
Cindy was halfway to the bathroom; its door was closed against the stench of an unflushed toilet. She stopped and turned around. “Dale? Did he say why?”
“You said you’re carrying a satphone, didn’t you? He’d like to borrow it.”
“Yeah, why not?” Cindy shrugged. “We won’t get anyone with it. I’ve already tried to call my folks in Boston.”
“I told him that, but …” Sharon finished buttoning her shirt. “C’mon. I’d like to see what he’s got in mind.”
Dale’s cabana was on the other side of the pool. Like Cindy, he was rooming with a cop: Karl Overby, Sharon’s partner. In his case, though, it was a matter of insistence. Cindy didn’t know much about him other than that he worked for some federal agency, he knew a lot about computers, and his job was important enough that he requested – demanded, really – that he stay with police officer. Dale was pleasant enough — he faintly resembled Cindy’s old high school math teacher, whom she’d liked — but he’d been keeping a certain distance from everyone else in the hotel.
“Cindy, hi.” Dale looked up from the laptop on his desk when she knocked on the room’s half-open door. “Thanks for coming over. I’ve got a favor to ask. Do you…?”
“Have a satphone? Sure.” It was in the backpack Cindy had carried with her on the plane. She’d flown to Minneapolis to hook up with an old college roommate for a camping trip in the lakes region, where cell coverage was spotty and it wasn’t smart to be out in the woods with no way to contact anyone. “Not that it’s going to do you any good.”
Dale didn’t seem to hear the last. “So long as it’s battery isn’t dead —” a questioning look; Cindy shook her head “—I might be able to hook it up to my laptop through their serial ports. Maybe I can get through to someone.”
“I don’t know how.” Sharon leaned against the door. “Internet’s gone down. My partner and I found that out when we tried to use our cruiser laptop.” She nodded at the digits on Dale’s laptop. “We just got that, same as everyone else.”
“Yes, well…” Dale absently ran a hand through thinning brown hair. “The place I want to try is a little better protected than most.”
“Where’s that, sir? The Pentagon?” Sharon’s demeanor changed; she was a cop again, wanting a straight answer to a straight question. “You showed us a Pentagon I.D. when you came over here from the airport. Is that where you work?”
“No. That’s just a place I sometimes visit. My job is somewhere else.” Dale hesitated, then he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Opening it, he removed a laminated card and showed it to Sharon. “This is where I work.”
Cindy caught a glimpse of the card. His photo was above his name, Dale F. Heinz, and at the top of the card was National Security Agency. She had only the vaguest idea of what that was, but Sharon was obviously impressed.
“Okay. You’re NSA.” Her voice was very quiet. “So maybe you know what’s going on here.”
“That’s what I’d like find out. Tonight, once we’ve gone upstairs to a balcony room.”
*
Minneapolis was dying.
From the balcony of a concierge suite – the only tenth-floor room whose door wasn’t locked – the city was a dark expanse silhouetted by random fires. No lights in the nearby industrial park, and the distant skyscrapers were nothing but black, lifeless shapes looming in the starless night. Sharon thought there ought to be the sirens of first-responders – police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances – but she heard nothing but an occasional gunshot. The airport was on the other side of the hotel, so she couldn’t tell where the jet which had crashed there was still ablaze. Probably not, and if its fire had spread from the runway to the hangers or terminals, those living in the Wyatt-Centrum would have known it by now; the hotel was only a mile away.
A muttered obscenity brought her back to the balcony. Dale was seated at a sofa end-table they’d dragged through the sliding door; his laptop lay open upon it, connected to Cindy’s satphone. He’d hoped to get a clear uplink once he was outside, and a top floor balcony was the safest place to do this. And it appeared to have worked; gazing over his shoulder, Sharon saw that the countdown had disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the NSA seal.
“You got through.” Cindy stood in the open doorway, holding a flashlight over Dale’s computer. The satphone belonged to her, so she’d insisted on coming along. Sharon had, too, mainly because Dale might need protection. After the incident in the kitchen, there was no telling how many ‘bots might still be active in the hotel, as yet undiscovered.
“I got there, yeah … but I’m not getting in. Look” Dale’s fingers ran across the keyboard, and a row of asterisks appeared in the password bar. He tapped the Enter key; a moment later, Access Denied appeared beneath the bar. “That was my backdoor password. It locked out my official one, too.”
“At least you got through. That’s got to count for something, right?”
Dale quietly gazed at the screen, absently rubbing his lower lip. “It does,” he said at last, “but I don’t like it means.”
He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two. “Want to talk about it?” Sharon asked. “We’ve got a right to know, don’t you think?”
Dale slowly let out his breath. “This isn’t just any government website. It belongs to the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s electronic surveillance facility in Bluffdale, Utah.” He glanced up at Sharon. “Ever heard of it?”
“Isn’t that the place where they bug everyone’s phone?”
“That’s one way of putting it, yeah. Bluffdale does more than that, though … a lot more. They’re tapped into the entire global information grid. Not just phone calls … every piece of email, every download, every data search, every bank transaction. Anything that’s transmitted or travels down a wire gets filtered through this place.”
“You gotta be kidding.” Harold appeared in the doorway behind Cindy, apparently having found the restroom he’d been searching for. He’d tagged along as well, saying that Sharon might need help if they ran into any more ‘bots. Sharon knew that this was just an excuse to attach himself to Cindy, but didn’t say anything. Her roommate knew how to keep away from a wolf … and indeed, she left the doorway and squeezed in beside Dale, maintaining a discrete distance from the annoying salesman.
“Not at all. There’s two and half acres of computers there with enough processing power to scan a yottabyte of information every second. That’s like being able to read 500 quintillion pages.”
Harold
