Invasion of Privacy (31 page)

Seated in the cockpit of ONE 1, Ian Prince completed his preflight checklist. Takeoff was scheduled for 0630. Weather en route was calm and clear. He forecast flying time to be two and a half hours, so he’d be arriving in Utah at approximately 0800 local time. He put down his clipboard and watched the sun creep over the horizon.

Today was the day.

Serena, the chief flight attendant, poked her head into the cockpit. “Everyone present and accounted for.”

“Mr. Briggs manage to find his way aboard?” It was a rhetorical question. Ian had seen Briggs arrive at the FBO and hurry across the tarmac, looking far worse for wear. Noticeably, Briggs had not come inside the cockpit to say good morning or to offer his usual briefing.

“He looks like he had a pretty rough night,” said the attendant.

“Well, we all know Peter.”

“Katarina is ready for you anytime after takeoff, but she says to hurry if you want to take all your fluids. Mr. Gold and Mr. Wolkowicz are sleeping in the guest compartment. Forward door is secured and ready for takeoff.”

Ian taxied to the main runway and radioed the tower for clearance. He received it, and a moment later eased the thrusters forward. As the speedometer touched 120, he eased the yoke toward him. The nose rose effortlessly. The wheels left Earth’s embrace. ONE 1 climbed into a cloudless blue sky.

Ian remained at the controls until the plane reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, then handed off responsibilities to his copilot. “Stick is yours.”

“I have the stick.”

Ian made his way into the main compartment. Briggs sat upright in his seat, reading from his tablet.

“Interesting night?” asked Ian, taking the seat across from him.

“Had worse.”

“And Mary Grant?”

“Nothing to report. The ball’s in your court, right?”

“So it is. I don’t anticipate having any more problems with her.”

“If you say so.”

“See you when we get to Utah.” Ian patted Briggs on the shoulder and headed aft to his private quarters. He felt like a man whose vision had been restored after long years of blindness.

Finally he could see.

The cabin sat on a patch of grassland at the end of a dirt road, as lonely as the sole house on a Monopoly board. They’d passed the last dwelling several miles back, and that was already twenty miles due east of the highway.

“When you said ‘off the grid,’ you weren’t kidding,” said Mary as she got out of the car. “And you come here for what, exactly?”

“Quail hunting. I call it my lodge. Not much to look at this time of year, but in the spring the creek fills up and the grass grows waist-high.”

“And no one knows about it?”

Tank hauled himself out of the car and walked unsteadily to the house. “Plenty of people do. But they’re my buddies. There isn’t any paperwork or court records or deeds that Ian Prince or Edward Mason can check to give them the idea we may be hiding out here. Water comes from our own well. Power from my generator. Nothing they can trace.”

“I can see that.”

Mary stood behind him as he fished his keys out of his shorts. She was thinking about the poster on Jessie’s wall and its line about “information wanting to be free.” She believed she understood what it meant. Words, ideas, expressions, all had a life of their own—if not a life exactly, some inchoate animus that screamed for attention. You might keep them quiet for a while, but their very existence militated toward exposure and dissemination. The same went for the evidence Stark had put on the flash drive.

Tank threw open the door. “After you.”

Couch, table, potbellied stove, cabinets. “Nice,” said Mary. “Abe Lincoln would have felt right at home. You’re only missing a chamber pot.”

“Facilities are out back. This isn’t the Ritz-Carlton.”

“I noticed that. Even have the half-moon painted on the door.”

“We aim to please.”

Tank locked the door behind them before collapsing on the couch. “Coffee and mugs are above the sink.”

“You doing okay?”

“I’ll make it.”

Mary fed the stove with kindling and got a fire going, then heated a pot of water and made coffee while Potter sat with the tablet, immersing himself in Stark’s files. “He delivered the goods. No question.”

Mary sat beside him. There were the three folders, Merriweather, Orca, and Titan, each brimming with hundreds of files. They began with Merriweather.

The directory showed e-mails from Ian Prince to Edward Mason and from Mason to Prince; from Prince to Peter Briggs, and from Briggs to a Wm. McNair. (It was Briggs who’d texted McNair: “Done?”) There were also e-mails from Prince to Harold Stark. Next came a dozen FBI case files that should never have appeared on a private corporation’s server. Joe had worked the Merriweather case along with Randy Bell and Fergus Keefe, and it appeared that Ian Prince had obtained every witness interview, every progress report, every request for evidence the agents had ever filed.

A cursory examination showed that the Merriweather investigation had begun promisingly. Several key Merriweather shareholders gave sworn affidavits about intimidation tactics directed against them by individuals they suspected of working for ONE Technologies. Another shareholder spoke of an anonymous threat to expose his son’s drug addiction if he did not vote his shares for ONE. There was an affidavit from Merriweather’s chief financial officer that confidential sales data had been stolen from the company’s servers, and laterally, a complaint by the chief technical officer about the theft of secret engineering data for a project called Titan (which Mary and Potter presumed was the subject matter of the folder of that name).

But then the investigation went sideways. One witness recanted his affidavit, claiming that he had been coerced into making a false statement. Another fell ill and could not be interviewed. Requests for information from ONE went unanswered. Subpoenas were challenged. It was a classic case of stonewalling. But instead of pressing harder, which was the FBI’s normal modus operandi, the Bureau backed off. A memo from Fergus Keefe to Joe and Randy Bell requested that they terminate the investigation. Both men objected, but to no avail. A week later
John Merriweather perished in a plane crash and the case was officially closed. The sale to ONE Technologies was approved shortly thereafter.

There was more to it than that, as Harold Stark had made sure that Joe would find out. With a mixture of anger and disbelief, Mary read through a series of e-mails from Ian Prince to Edward Mason requesting that the FBI’s deputy director “tamp down” the Merriweather investigation. Lobbying on Ian’s behalf was the director of the NSA, who called ONE’s acquisition of Merriweather and the forthcoming Titan supercomputer “paramount to ensuring the continued supremacy of United States intelligence- and data-gathering efforts around the world.” Mason responded that so far the investigation had not turned up sufficient evidence to indicate criminal wrongdoing, and he would do his utmost to bring the case to a quick and favorable conclusion.

At this Mary offered a disgusted expletive. When did a sitting deputy director of the FBI offer any kind of comment to the CEO of a company it was investigating? she asked Tank. Let alone promise that he would aid in shutting the investigation down?

A moment later they discovered the reason. They found the smoking gun: an e-mail from Ian Prince to Edward Mason confirming the transfer of $10 million to a numbered account in Liechtenstein of which Mason was the sole beneficiary.

“Ten million,” said Tank. “That buys a lot of margaritas.”

“Ian Prince must have wanted Merriweather pretty badly.”

“I’m beginning to guess why.”

“Titan?”

He nodded grimly.

Setting the tablet on her lap, Mary opened the Titan folder. Not e-mails and documents this time, but complex computer engineering schematics. Diagrams showing the layout and manufacture of Titan’s internal components, many with significant sections highlighted in yellow and words like
bypass, backdoor, override
. To a layman the plans were as incomprehensible as they were impressive. Aware of this, Hal Stark had provided a one-page explanation for the common man.

“It’s the mother lode,” said Tank after they’d finished reading. “He’s got it all. Hook, line, and sinker.”

“Do people in the government know he’s modified their computers?”

“No chance. I don’t think they’d appreciate Ian Prince looking over their shoulders.”

Mary laid her head back and sighed.

“Look at this,” said Tank after a minute. “From Mason to Prince. It’s about Joe.”

Mary snapped to attention. In the message Mason warned Prince that a secret task force had been established by Dylan Walsh, the chief of the FBI’s Cyber Investigations Division, to look into ONE’s hacking of the FBI’s servers for six months during the company’s takeover of Merriweather Systems. The task force was named Semaphore.

“Joe was investigating ONE all the time,” said Tank. “He knew exactly what Prince was up to.”

“You got your story.”

“Story? I’ve got a book,” said Tank. “But I’ll start with a story. How’s this for a lead: ‘Last December, Edward Mason, deputy director of the FBI, received a ten-million-dollar payment from Ian Prince, founder and chief executive officer of ONE Technologies, to a numbered account at the National Bank of Liechtenstein in exchange for halting the FBI’s investigation into charges against the company of extortion and shareholder intimidation relating to its takeover of Merriweather Systems’?”

“Sounds good.”

“Front page. Above the fold.”

Mary was looking back at the Merriweather folder. “There’s something we missed.”

“What is it?”

“Something a lot worse than extortion.” Mary moved the cursor onto the icon for a document inside the Merriweather folder titled “Crash.”

The document ran to one page and was a screenshot of computer code. At the top, a single line of clarification: “Malware used against John Merriweather’s on-board navigation system (serial number XXX77899). Installed 12/15 by Ian Prince.”

Mary looked up. “You said that John Merriweather flew his plane into the side of a mountain. Pilot error.”

“Apparently not.”

“Your story just got a lot better.” She checked her watch and stood, shocked at the time. “I have to go. My flight leaves at seven-fifty-five.”

“Hold on,” said Tank. “You still have five minutes. Let’s take a look at Orca.”

And five minutes was all they needed to learn about Ian Prince’s
plans to construct the largest supertanker ever built. Not even a supertanker, really, but an island, by the look of the elevations provided. An island with homes for a few thousand people, factories, offices, an airstrip, a beach, its own nuclear power plant, and, every bit as impressive, rising directly in its center, a mountain. An island or a ship or something entirely new.

“Why did Stark name the file Orca?” Mary asked.

“Because he’s a bit of a joker. Orca’s the name of the shark fisherman’s boat in
Jaws
,” said Tank. “The movie. Don’t you remember what Roy Scheider says when he and Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss are way out in the middle of the ocean and he first sees the shark?”

“No,” said Mary. “I don’t.”

“ ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat.’ ” Tank put down the tablet. “Ian Prince built himself the biggest boat ever.”

“What kind of shark is he afraid of?”

Tank shrugged and pulled himself off the couch. “Time for you to skedaddle.”

“I can’t drive that thing. Even if I could, I couldn’t. The police will be looking everywhere for it.”

“Take my truck. It’s out in the shed. Keys are in the ignition.”

“And you?”

“I’ll find a way back into town.”

Mary stood and walked with him to the door. “We did good,” she said.

“Your husband did good. But our work won’t be done till we get that story to the paper.”

“Isn’t there a way we can send over all the files?”

“No connection out here. No cell service. No wireless. Like I said—”

“ ‘Off the grid.’ ”

“Yep.”

Mary kissed Tank on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I told you, I’m in this game for myself. Now go get your daughter.”

Mary stepped outside and crossed the yard to a ramshackle shed. The truck was an old Ford, even more beat-up than the Jeep, with manual transmission and springs pushing through the worn-out seats. The engine turned over on the first try. She stopped in front of the cabin. “Write your story.”

“
Our
story,” said Tank.

Mary put the truck into drive and headed down the dirt road. A wind had picked up and filled the cabin with the scent of thistle and loam. In the rearview mirror she saw Tank waving. She thought he was calling to her. She wasn’t sure, but it sounded as if he was saying something about a buggy whip.

“Mine.”

Its official name was the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, though it was better known as simply the Utah Data Center. And it sat on 240 acres carved from the hillside directly above Highway 71, between the town of Bluffdale and Salt Lake City.

No measures had been taken to hide the facility. Four data halls measuring 100,000 square feet and built parallel to one another housed the thousands of servers necessary to store the oceans of data it collected. The halls were serviced by a dedicated cooling station. An on-site power plant provided the compound’s electricity. To the naked eye it looked like nothing more glamorous than a giant Walmart or Costco or Target distribution center, the kind of gargantuan bland warehouses that lined highways in rural areas all over the United States.

And it belonged to the National Security Agency, which was to say that it belonged to the combined intelligence establishment of the United States of America.

After the successful demonstration of ONE’s Titan supercomputer, it would belong to Ian Prince.

“This is it,” said Bob Goldfarb, the Emperor’s gnomish assistant. “Time to see what all those exaflops get us.”

“Like a hammer on a walnut,” said Ian. “AES doesn’t stand a chance.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Goldfarb, eyes twinkling with dreams of world domination. “And so does the president.”

Not all of the Utah Data Center was visible to the naked eye. The Operations Room sat inside a nuclear-hardened concrete bunker three hundred feet below the surface. It was a SCIF inside a SCIF, with floor-to-ceiling monitors on the walls, rows of analysts’ workstations, flags standing in the corners.

This morning the Operations Room was filled to capacity, seats taken by a mix of government and military personnel, the overflow lining the walls. The briefing was beyond top-secret or ultra top-secret or whatever was the latest term for the highest security clearance in the land. The vice president was present and stood with his coterie next to General Terry Wolfe. Even the president was in attendance, if from two thousand miles away, joining them along with the national security adviser and the director of the CIA from the Situation Room beneath the White House.

Ian stood against the back wall, arms crossed. He’d left Briggs in the visitors’ lounge, along with a dozen other high-ranking officers and officials who did not possess adequate clearance. Ian was part of the brain trust. General Wolfe called him his own Oppenheimer. While others theorized, Ian had built the damned thing.

Seventy years ago a similar group had gathered in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, to gaze at a round object perched atop a tall tower and bear witness to the first atomic explosion in the history of mankind. Fat Man and Little Boy were but a black-and-white memory. The new kid on the block was named Titan.

The NSA had purchased it for but one purpose: to decrypt information culled from the deep Web, or Deepnet—the part of the Internet invisible to the common man. The Deepnet included all passwordprotected data, both government and commercial; all U.S. and foreign government communications; and all noncommercial file sharing between trusted peers. The problem had never been collecting the information. With sieves at every transit point in every communications hub on earth, the NSA was capable of collecting all it wanted. The problem was decryption.

All data found on the Deepnet was encrypted according to the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, a theoretically unbreakable shell encasing each message to protect it from intruding eyes and to ensure that only the intended recipient read it. To date, no machine had been able to crack the AES in anything close to a quick and efficient manner.

Titan would change that.

Titan, with its enormous processing power, its gargantuan intellect, its unfathomable speed, could break any code within seconds. Titan was the hammer to AES’s shell. One blow, and
crack
! The shell would disintegrate.

Ian could see by the skeptical expressions that few present this morning believed Titan would work. Ian had no doubt. He knew.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please.” General Terry Wolfe stood at the front of the room, fussing with his eyeglasses. “We’ve gathered here today to witness the first operational test of the new Titan supercomputer. We’re going to start with an intercept we pulled down from our friends in Moscow. Judging from the format, it looks like it’s from FSB director Gromov to a counterpart in Kiev. We’ve been at it for two days now and we can’t crack the shell.” A nod to a technician. “Go ahead. Let’s see what Titan can do.”

The technician fed the intercept into Titan. Lines of encrypted code flooded the main screen: letters, symbols, numerals, a seemingly random mishmash. The word
Processing
flashed at the bottom as Titan ran the message through multiple decryption programs simultaneously.

“Two days and we can’t make head nor tail of it,” whispered Goldfarb. “Not all the bright Russians are working for Google.”

Ian stared at the screen, hands clasped behind his back, as the seconds ticked by. A minute passed, and then another. Someone cleared his throat. A chair slid across the floor. There was a cough. Reports of Titan’s superpowers had been overrated.

“At least you got the heat issue fixed,” said Goldfarb. “That’s a start.”

Someone said, “Hey!”

A hush swept the room.

“Here we go,” said the Emperor.

Ian didn’t alter his expression as the mishmash of letters, symbols, and numerals was replaced line by line with a message, not only decrypted but translated into flawless English.

From: Yuri Gromov, Director, FSB

Recipient: Boris Klitschko, President, Ukraine

Text: In regards to the premier’s upcoming visit, he has asked that you have ten kilos American dry-aged filet per day on hand to be prepared medium rare, sliced thinly, and served to Ivan at 6 a.m., 1 p.m., and 8 p.m. promptly. There will be an afternoon snack of one kilo steak tartare. Ivan also requires at least five cashmere blankets and two veal shank bones with marrow
.

“Who the hell’s Ivan?” It was the president, asking from the Situation Room.

“I believe it’s his dog,” said the CIA director. “An Irish wolfhound.”

Laughter all around.

Ian felt a presence at his side. He looked over to see the vice president glaring at him. “So we built a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar data center employing the world’s most advanced supercomputer to learn what the Russian premier’s dog likes to eat.”

The vice president had long opposed the expansion of the secret state and was a vocal opponent of the Utah Data Center.

The laughter died.

“Happy, Mr. Prince?” he whispered. “Get to add another zero to your fortune. You guys are all snake-oil salesmen. Only your gadget can save the world. Give me a break. What are we supposed to do with all this stuff, anyway?”

“I think you’re missing the point,” said Ian. “It isn’t what’s in the message, it’s the fact that we were able to read it.”

The vice president turned his attention to the Emperor. “Anything else up your sleeve, General Wolfe?” he barked.

The NSA director fidgeted as he adjusted his eyeglasses yet again. “Impress us, Dave,” he said to an air force colonel seated nearby.

“Yessir.” Dave punched away at his keys. Voices played over the loudspeaker. Ian recognized the language as Mandarin, but a northern dialect. A translation of the conversation appeared in real time on the main screen.

“The meeting began fifteen minutes ago,”
said someone identified only as Speaker 1.
“The vice president, the director of the National Security Agency, and many other government functionaries are in attendance. Pictures show that sixteen vehicles arrived at the site in the last hour. We believe they are testing the new hardware that was recently installed.”

“What is it?”
said Speaker 2.
“Titan?”

“We are not yet certain, but most probably it is a more sophisticated processing apparatus.”

“Are we at risk?”

“Absolutely not. No one can penetrate our systems.”

“Gentlemen, we are listening to a general at the Chinese Ministry of State Security in Beijing speaking to China’s vice premier, over a secure, encrypted line. Normally it would take us several hours to
break the encryption, if we could at all. As we are all witnesses, the translation is real-time. It seems, Mr. President, that the Chinese are talking about us. They are discussing the demonstration of Titan.
Here. Today. Now
. The pictures they are referring to come from one of their spy satellites looking down on us from a few hundred miles up. In effect we are spying on our enemies spying on us—and we are having a better time of it.”

In the Situation Room, the president did nothing to hide his pride. “And it’s these new machines that are enabling this?” asked the vice president.

“Yessir,” said Wolfe. “It is. Here’s another we have queued up. This conversation began three minutes ago and is continuing.”

This time it was Arabic voices, but the translation was as timely and accurate as before. Wolfe explained that the group was listening in on a conversation between the Saudi Arabian minister of defense and a man named Mohammed Fawzi, an Algerian who headed up Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

“My forces are being decimated,”
said Fawzi.
“We have nowhere to hide.”

“Patience, my friend,”
said the Saudi.

“Fuck patience. Time is an expensive commodity. We need money to purchase it, money for better communications equipment, for more safe houses, and to pay men to take the place of those martyred.”

“The king will make his usual contribution.”

“Five million dollars isn’t enough. I need at least ten if we are to continue with Paris as the king wishes.”

“The king does not like Paris. He was asked to leave a hotel there once. The Meurice. It is owned by Jews. You must continue with Paris.”

Wolfe killed the feed. “Please be aware that the Central Intelligence Agency has been in the loop about Paris for some time now.”

The vice president raised a hand to summon the room’s attention. “Just one question,” he said. “If you guys can listen to the Chinese all the way in Shanghai or Beijing or wherever the hell they are, and to Al-Qaeda wherever the hell they are, and everyone’s talking on
secure and encrypted links, what’s to stop you from listening in on the president when he’s talking to the British prime minister over our own secure encrypted link?”

“Yes,” echoed the president. “How do I know you won’t be listening to me?”

General Wolfe pulled at his cuffs, then adjusted his glasses. His eyes darted to Ian and Bob Goldfarb, then back to the screen. “Because, Mr. President,” he said with a Boy Scout’s solemnity, “that would be illegal.”

These days, thought Ian, the law is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

One hour later Ian was back aboard ONE 1, seated in the aft lounge. Katarina had given him his supplements. His IV was dutifully administering his phosphatidylcholine, bathing his telomeres with life-extending nutrients. His laptop was open in front of him, his eyes keenly studying the screen.

Seven years running.

David Gold entered the cabin, slim, tanned, a force. “Ian, you wanted to see me.”

Ian looked up, placing a mental bookmark to remind him where he was. “Yes, David. One question: are we getting all of it?”

“Oh yes,” said the Israeli computer scientist. “Our machines capture everything that goes in and out of the Operations Room. That’s what Clarus does.”

“So I really can listen in on the president and the British PM on their secure line?”

Gold dug his chin into his throat, a man affronted. “Why, of course. Tell me, is there anything that Titan can help you with? Anything that’s of pressing concern?”

Ian tapped his fingers on the table. A name came to mind. A fiery, red-headed Mick with a big mouth and dangerous opinions.

“As a matter of fact, there is.”