Razing Beijing: A Thriller (64 page)

An angry Ralph Perry was quickly trying to adjust to the
terrain. He forced his palms flat on the table. “Shutting down a business
doesn’t seem to me the way to sting an espionage operation.”

Gil Campbell had turned pale. He sat with his jaw slack,
shrugging whenever Perry cast him a glare. For her part, O.T.T. Director
Gingras seemed obligated to defend the company’s position. “I have to agree
with Mr. Perry,” she said. “I arrived today with the understanding that
security precautions by the contractor were already intensified. I would be
remiss not to advise the chair that by disrupting the Project at this
precarious stage, a decision to resume in the future may incur prohibitive cost
to the government.”

Senator Milner sat back with hands clasped behind his neck,
reflecting on the exchange as he gazed at the ceiling.

“We have some eighty engineering and technical staff who’ve
dedicated years to the Project,” Perry added. “We cannot simply absorb eighty
salaried personnel.”

Gingras reminded the panel of their obligation to inform
the foreign governments involved.

“The panel will see to the appropriation of ninety days
salary to facilitate staff transition to other assignments,” Arns said
following a brief huddle on the bench. He let out a deep sigh. “I’m sorry it
had to come to this. You will have ninety-six hours to finalize housekeeping
and other administration beginning Friday, July 10. That’s one week from today.
I would suggest you make good use of it. United States Marshals will arrive
onsite to secure the facility.”

“What the...?” Perry snapped his head toward Joanne Lewis. “Does
our cancellation clause allow for anything like this?”

“Not that I—”

Perry rose from his chair. His voice was firm and without
emotion. “This is an outrage.”

Lewis looked up at her employer. “Ralph, this won’t do any
good.”

Perry rounded on her. “
This is illegal!
”

Senator Arns cast a disapproving glare as if a line had
been crossed. “Motion to adjourn.”

“Second,” Milner announced.

Disbelieving faces stared back from the hearing chamber
as Subcommittee Chairman Reynolds delivered his gavel.

RALPH PERRY WAS APOPLECTIC
as he stormed out of the Senate Russell Building with Lewis in tow.

“Something smells,” Lewis’s voice jostled as she jogged
down the steps in an effort to keep up with her boss. “I need to do some asking
around.”

Perry stopped suddenly and Lewis nearly ran into him. “You
led me to believe you had connections on the Hill.”

“Ralph, really.”

“Then why didn’t you see this coming?” He turned his back
on her and continued toward the parking lot.

“You could be right, I’m not sure what they’re doing is
legal.”

“What is this national security bullshit?” Perry stopped,
again struck by a thought. “You’re family with Stuart. Where is he today?”

Lewis blinked back her surprise. “It’s not my job to keep
track of him.”

“Oh, really? I hope your feelings for Stuart aren’t at the
root of our problems here.”

Lewis was stunned into silence.

“And U.S. Marshals? What the hell sort of tactic is
that
?”

Lewis shook her head clear. “Seriously. We should
investigate the legality of this. I seem to recall a precedent here. Maybe we
can win an injunction against this lock-down.”

Perry studied her furiously.

“We do have several days,” Lewis said, pursuing the idea. “That
might be difficult, but what do we tell your employees in the mean time?”

Perry gave her a hard stare, then gazed across the
street over the trees and open space of the Capitol Plaza. “Let me worry about
the staff. You get to work on the injunction.”

AS IT HAPPENED,
Perry’s gaze passed over tourists, pedestrians walking their dogs, legislative
staff talking with lobbyists, joggers, the ever-present environmental
protesters gathered with placards resting on their shoulders—and one man
leaning against a tree, his attention riveted on the two forms departing the
Russell Building. Perry could be forgiven not recognizing the man responsible for
half his current headaches. He had not yet met Paul Devinn.

STUART SAID GOODNIGHT
to his daughter and hung up the phone. Brushing aside his lonesome self-pity, he
turned his thoughts to this afternoon at the White House. He reflected with
pride on the honor; how many men within the span of weeks go from FBI suspect
to rendering advice to the President? And yet, by the end of the day, not even
the sound of his daughter’s voice had brightened his mood.

Three hours later, Milton Thackeray sat resting his arms on
the table with his eyes closed, clutching a mug of coffee between his hands. Beside
him, Emily Chang was leafing through pages of the long defunct Anti-ballistic
Missile Treaty that Stuart had downloaded from the State Department archive.

Stuart had toed the line on what he thought he could legally
reveal about his meeting with ‘certain government agencies’—Emily cast him a
subtle glance whenever she read between the lines. Both of Stuart’s guests
understood the FBI were investigating the possibility of espionage and, as part
of an evolving theory that Thackeray was slow to accept, that a ‘malevolent
interest,’ perhaps the Chinese government, in fact may have reduced CLI’s
stolen intellectual property to a working device. Emily needed no prodding to
make the next leap in the thought process.

“
If
such a satellite exists,” she said, “and by your
logic it is based on technology stolen from CLI, then its governing software
might be similar, or almost identical, to the code written by CLI.”

Stuart nodded—he wondered if Emily knew how alluring men
found her. She possessed an easy intelligence, challenging yet playful, which
for him enhanced her femininity. Thin wisps of hair framed bright, intelligent
eyes, questioning eyes inviting engagement.

As if reading his thoughts, Emily parted her lips in a
smile.

Stuart returned her smile and asked, “So how difficult
would it be?”

“To do what?”

“How difficult for you to write something for communicating
with such a satellite?”

Thackeray opened his eyes. Stuart followed his glance
around what was once his ex-wife’s favorite room, their wine tasting cellar. Certain
of its features had given Stuart reason enough to venture in here tonight,
something he hadn’t attempted since Angela’s death. The polished mahogany table
surrounded by leather chairs deep enough to fall asleep in, bathed in recessed
light as well as pastel-colored mood lights washing over the exposed stone
walls, Bose sound system, a thousand-bottle wine cooler—things Stuart had not a
lot of use for, except for tonight, in that it was all below ground level and
the most secure place he could find on such short notice.

“I’ll bet this place set you back a few ten notes,”
Thackeray observed.

“None of your business.”

“You know, I was thinking I’m about due for a raise.”

Stuart leaned slowly toward him. “Tell you what. Soon as we
wrap up tonight—you’ve got it.”

Thackeray shifted his glance back and forth between Emily
and Stuart. “Right. How much?”

“Ten feet, all the way back up the stairs you just came down
to get here.”

Emily looked accusingly at Stuart. “That’s very
unprofessional.”

“I know. I can’t help myself.”

Thackeray shook his head. “I know something about the crew
at NORAD. You say they lost track of it?”

Again without revealing his source, Stuart provided all
that McBurney had revealed of his grudging suspicion that, should Stuart’s ‘techie
weapon’ actually exist, the so-called ‘phantom satellite’ might be one and the
same.

“This satellite goes into orbit, and now they can’t find it.
What makes you think we can?”

Stuart considered that for a moment. “You have something NORAD
doesn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like grotesque personality. But mostly agility, and skin-in-the-game.”

Thackeray rolled his eyes and muttered, too tired to
conceal skepticism bordering on boredom. “There are more than two-thousand
satellites orbiting the earth. Not counting all the little pieces of junk
sprinkled in that this missing thing probably looks like.”

“But that number includes everything—geostationary,
de-commissioned or otherwise
kaput
.”

Thackeray grunted. “I guess you could narrow the search to
operational ones in low-earth orbit.”

“So how many is that?”

Thackeray lolled his head back and forth.

“For Christ’s sake, you’ve got six million dollars worth of
gadgets on the roof out there at CLI to play with. Are you really going to sit
back and let these bastards outgun you with your own handiwork?”

Thackeray folded his arms. “This isn’t our fight.”

“It is our fight. The beauty of it is, if I’m wrong then
there won’t be any harm done. But if I am right, and we choose to ignore this...you
know somebody, someday, is going to step onto the world stage and claim credit
for it.”

Thackeray stared at him. “Even if I could find it, military
satellites have security protocols as long as your arm.”

Stuart realized Emily was looking at him in a curious way.
Hadn’t
she been doing that a lot lately?
“Finding it won’t matter if we don’t have
a means to communicate with it. Emily, I need to know if you think getting past
these other barriers is going to be worth the effort.”

Collecting her thoughts, Emily lowered her gaze to the
downloaded pages. The Defense Department had apparently tested a limited
variety of anti-satellite weapons, including some sort of jet-launched ‘ASAT’
missile, a kinetic energy satellite interceptor and something called the MIRACL
laser. But many of the tests were conducted back in the 1990’s, the results not
fully published. The hue and cry over such weapons had curtailed development
funding. Years later, launch of the final elements of the National Missile
Defense system was expected to assist in ‘detecting and cataloging space-borne
assets,’ Pentagon euphemism for tracking enemy satellites. According to Stu,
and the various Internet sources, even that capability did not yet exist.

“Well,” Emily said finally, “assuming the code is based on
CLI’s, and we somehow deal with the subject of encryption, and if the key
command variables are similar...it certainly will be difficult. But I think
it’s possible to write a code for communicating with it.” She narrowed her
eyes. “Thack has a point. The encryption would be a big problem.”

“Tell me more about the encryption.”

Emily moistened her lips. “How familiar are you with encryption?”

“I know the idea is to render information undecipherable to
any party intercepting it for whom the message, or data, is not intended. Other
than that, I wouldn’t know a cryptoid if I tripped over the bastard.”

“Cryptoid?”

“Never mind.”

Emily went on to explain that the core of any encryption
system is the algorithm software. Both sender and recipient needed to use the
same software. “Theoretically, the whole world could employ the same software
and not decrypt intercepted messages. You also need to know the encryption
key.”

“That’s just a code, right?”

“Yes, a digital code. It’s length and character content can
vary. The sender selects a secret key to be used by the encryption software. Some
systems use multiple layers of protection. As you can imagine, these can be
very secure.”

“So we would need to know the software and the keys?”

“No,” Thack said, “you need to
have
the software and
the keys. Sometimes having the software is easy. Many systems utilize the Data
Encryption Standard algorithm, for example. Triple DES employs a 168-bit authentication
key. It’s pretty secure.”

Stuart scratched the side of his nose. “Can somebody
memorize this key, like an ATM pin number?”

“Sure,” Thackeray said. “You can memorize a phone book. A
64 binary digit key has 8 characters. But don’t be fooled. It’s usually not
that simple.”

“A powerful computer can crack these codes.”

“In a practical sense, not always. Adding one bit to key
length doubles the time to complete a cryptanalytic search. Our supercomputer
would need probably three or four hundred years to brute-force a Triple DES key.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Maybe twice that long...I’d have to run the numbers.”

They debated other issues; assuming they were to gain
access inside the satellite system, would they encounter intruder detection
software? Would they have adequate access to various functions and modules? What
levels of authority and degree of mobility would they find between not only the
onboard computers, but also any communication satellites?

Finally there was a long silence.

“When do you leave?” Thackeray asked, referring to Stuart’s
stated plans for leaving town on ‘unspecified business.’

“Not for a couple of days.” Stuart’s reply was as vague as
McBurney’s had been.

Stuart watched Emily’s expression change from dubious frown,
to strangely unreadable, and then, reflective. “What is it?” he asked her.

“I was just thinking,” she responded airily. “If this
satellite is what we suspect it to be, and we
did
take control of it,
what would we do with it?”

“You can’t do much from inside a prison cell,” Thackeray offered.

“We’d stop whoever it is from using it,” Stuart countered. He
didn’t really want to spark a debate over the ethics involved, or the potential
response of the satellite’s owner. “Why do you ask?”