The Polaris Protocol (17 page)

K
nuckles slithered around the pool on his belly, staying in the foliage, Blood following close behind. I saw Blood take a low knee, his pistol on the door, then Knuckles duck-walked forward the last few meters. He tried the knob, then turned and waved his hand in front of his face in a deliberate motion, like a director signaling “cut.”

Unlocked. Perfect.

He stayed put, keeping the movement down, and we all collapsed in on Blood’s position. I got a thumbs-up from the people around me, then pointed at Jennifer. I could tell the adrenaline was flowing, but her hands were steady. She inhaled and exhaled, then nodded.

I pointed at Knuckles, and we rose, running to the door in a crouch. Two feet from it, he pulled the latch down and swung it open, letting us flow into the target like hornets looking for a victim.

Jennifer entered and jerked right, out of my sight. I spent no time on the target in the den, trusting her to eliminate the threat, running straight to my breach, knowing I had four other men doing the same. I heard the spitting of her Glock and kicked the door inward, leading with my weapon. I saw a man behind a huge desk working a computer, the fat cigar in his mouth spilling to the floor at my entrance. He lurched forward toward a pistol, and I drilled him in the forehead.

The room wasn’t that large and was secure in a half second, before Jennifer even made it to us. We bounded back into the den and began clearing, racing silently through the large expanse, checking nooks and crannies. We reached the end of the den, which choked into a hallway that stretched away, deeper into the house. To my front I could see a stairwell leading up, with a door immediately on my left.

I let the stack catch up, waited for the tap on my shoulder, then swung open the door. I almost bounded into it before I realized it was another stairwell, this one going down. And it stank.

The holding cell.

I said, “Jennifer, stay up here. Cover our back.”

She nodded, and we began bounding down the stairwell, one man covering while the other moved. Two-thirds of the way and the stairwell took a right-angle turn. Blood held up, putting his barrel around the turn for cover, and Decoy rounded the corner. We each took turns covering as the next man went, a dangerous game of tag.

By the time I had reached the bottom, someone had found a light switch, and I saw three men staring at me with a mixture of fear and hope, unsure where to place their trust. They were looking a little worse for wear, to put it mildly.

But no Jack Cahill.

All three were Latino. None were Caucasian. I held a finger to my lips, then heard Jennifer’s Glock snap, followed by a fusillade of rounds from an unsuppressed weapon.

Oops. They know we’re here.

We raced to the stairs, turning the corner and seeing Jennifer at the top firing controlled pairs and ducking back. Knuckles looked at me with a smug grin and I said, “Yeah, yeah. Good idea to bring Jennifer.”

If we hadn’t left her at the top, we would have been as badly trapped as the captives themselves, with no way to get up the stairs. A grandpa with a .22 could have prevented movement out.

We reached the top, staying in the protection of the stairwell, and Jennifer said, “Three guys came down the stairs. Two are still in the stairwell, one is dead.”

I leaned out and saw a body on the floor, about twenty meters away. I said, “Jennifer, suppress the stairwell. Blood, Decoy, get to the other side of the hall, back into the den.”

They nodded and I leaned over Jennifer’s shoulder, putting rounds into the banister of the stairwell. Jennifer followed my lead. Decoy and Blood made it across without issue and began to move down the hallway under the protection of our guns.

Before they reached the stairwell, Knuckles and I slid out, moving on the opposite side of the hall. We got within view of the stairwell and pied off the corner, preventing escape. Blood and Decoy turned into the opening and began firing. I heard one unsuppressed shot, then Decoy appeared, giving an all-clear. I turned and found Jennifer right behind us. I said, “Go down the stairwell. The hostages are there.”

Her eyes lit up, and I remembered.

“Jennifer, your brother wasn’t down there.”

She took that in, nodding vacantly. I said, “Check them for injuries and get them ready to move. Find out what they know.”

She nodded more forcefully and took off at a trot. We continued clearing, finding nobody else. The remainder of the house was empty. We rallied at the head of the basement stairs.

I said, “How are they?”

“They can move,” Jennifer said. “They’re a little beat up but ambulatory.”

“Okay, Blood, Decoy, figure out the gates to this place and bring in two vehicles. Knuckles, Jennifer, get them ready to load. I want to be out of here in less than a minute. No telling if any of these guys called reinforcements.”

Jennifer said, “Jack was here, Pike. They said that. He was here and taken out this morning.”

I said, “What? Here in this house?”

She nodded, her eyes boring into me, looking for the magic answer that I didn’t have. Truthfully, the words were like a hammer. Like being a Son Tay raider in Vietnam.

If we’d only gotten the intel earlier.

“Decoy and Blood, go. Get the vehicles up here.” After they left I said, “You sure?”

She said, “Yes. He was
here
.”

I ran through the risk and decided. “All right, listen. We have no more than five minutes to SSE this place, and that’s pushing it. Go find phones, laptops, CDs, thumb drives, whatever. Knuckles, take the last two rooms we cleared. The ones with desks. Jennifer, take the first room we entered. The dead guy in there looked important. I’ll take the den and kitchen. Ignore the second floor. It’s nothing but bedrooms.”

Jennifer gave me a grateful smile and we split up. I found nothing of interest in the den. The kitchen was the same, so I continued into the garage. I saw two Mercedes and a BMW, with a fourth spot empty. On the wall was an impeccably kept little key assortment, like you see at a valet stand. Three of the slots held two sets of keys or key fobs. The last slot held only one fob. A keyless-looking thing for a BMW.

And Jack had been taken from here in some type of vehicle.

I snatched it off the rack and returned, finding Decoy leading the captors to the front door. Knuckles had a couple of phones and a thumb drive. Jennifer had a hard drive she’d ripped from a computer.

In forty minutes we were out of the area and driving back to the city center. We segregated Felix from the other two and released them at the Zócalo in the historic district, giving them each a wad of pesos. I suppose we should have taken them to their respective houses, but the fewer people who saw us, the better. They’d have to make do with finding a taxi or using a pay phone. Felix, on the other hand, was a little more personal to us.

When we pulled over, the two were weeping uncontrollably, profusely praising and thanking us over and over. We admonished them not to say a word about the team, and, if asked, to say they had escaped on their own. I didn’t worry about them going to the authorities, because they were free and that was all that mattered in their minds. They knew going to the authorities wouldn’t get them any justice, so they wouldn’t bother. Very few kidnappings were reported in Mexico, and they probably didn’t trust the police not to take them back. The story might get out, but they had nothing to really go on, other than saying we were gringos.

We drove to the Gomez residence in Polanco and let Felix buzz us in. We went straight up the circular path, parking behind a late-model BMW. The bodyguards came flying out the door, guns drawn, and Felix waved at them. They looked flabbergasted. One shouted inside, and Mrs. Gomez came out. She saw Felix and went berserk.

He flew up the steps and was whisked inside. Arturo came out, wiping his eyes.

He said, “How did you do it? How did you find him?”

I said, “You found him. It was your GPS device.”

He pointed at Jennifer. “Did you find her brother as well?”

“No. He was there this morning but was taken out before we arrived.”

He grew solemn and said, “I’m so sorry. I can never repay you for what you’ve done. However I can help, I will.”

I stared at the BMW in the driveway. I pulled out the key fob I’d found and said, “You ever seen one of these?”

Confused, he said, “Yes, of course. I have the same thing. Why?”

“Is this the key to the car? How’s it work?”

“It’s keyless entry. Come here.”

He led me to the car, showed me his own key fob, then stuck his hand in the handle. The doors unlocked by proximity alone, and the seat began moving back. He said, “It controls the car.”

I leaned in and saw what I was hoping for: a little cover near the rearview mirror that opened up, exposing a red button like an old bomber switch. “What does this thing do?”

“You press it if you have car trouble, and someone from BMW gets you help. It works through satellite.” He pulled out a smartphone and tapped an app, saying, “Look, with it I can find my car using my phone. It shows where it is on a map.”

I bounced the fob in my hand, getting the sniggle of an idea. “You serious about helping me?”

“Of course, whatever I can do.”

“You know a BMW dealer around here?”

S
itting in his hotel room on Tower Road, just outside Denver International Airport, Booth placed two Garmin GPSs in the windowsill and waited for them to lock on to a signal. His flash drive already inserted, he stuck his thumb on the biometric scanner, disabled his software booby traps, and pulled up POLARIS, toying with his new interface.

It looked marvelous, exactly like the dials and switches on a 1990s-era stereo. The “volume” control set the desired length of time, the “radio tuner” set the degree of disruption of the timing signal, and the “equalizer” switches were each associated with a section of the world. He’d even designed a delay system allowing the settings to be uploaded for execution at a later date.

A person pretending to be Tom Cruise in
Risky Business,
jamming the volume and equalizer settings to the max while “tuned” to the highest FM “frequency,” would fatally disrupt the satellite-timing signal worldwide and subsequently render useless anything that leveraged the GPS constellation.

At least in theory, that is. While Booth was pleased with the aesthetics, sure that a child could use his program, he realized that he had no idea if it actually worked. It wasn’t like he could test the code as he wrote it. He’d had to create it whole, without any measure of success, then inject it based on faith.

Not wanting to fly out of Colorado Springs for security reasons, he’d made the drive to Denver International, coming up a day early and getting a hotel. Throughout the trip, a nagging thought had spread like oil on water:
What if the system doesn’t function?

Why fly all the way to Mexico City, put himself at the potential mercy of a suspected cartel boss, and then pass something that was little more than a broken string of ones and zeros? The protocol would do nothing, and his risk would be worthless. Unlike Manning and Snowden, he wasn’t exposing information, he was
using
it. He was the first to actually exploit the network for good instead of merely talking about it.

He consciously focused on the goal of stopping the United States’ injustice the world over, but he couldn’t keep another nagging thought from intruding: If it failed, he’d get no money at all. No way to pay off his drug debts. No way to escape.

Then he thought about the man receiving the protocol. Carlos. If POLARIS didn’t work, money would be the least of his problems. Maybe Booth should stay here. Just call it a day. Why go to Mexico and risk the wrath of someone like Carlos?

But that outcome was predicated on POLARIS’s failure. Something he could test right now. If POLARIS executed like he’d programmed, it would be worth a great deal of money. And he was the only one who could make it function. Carlos could threaten, but he needed Booth’s help.
If
the thing worked.

After checking in, he’d sat on the bed and contemplated a test.

It was a risk, because the disruption would definitely be felt, causing the 2nd SOPS and Boeing to go crazy trying to figure out what had happened, but that, in itself, was worth the test. He’d buried the protocol deep, cloaking it with the GPS constellation’s own code, making it impossible to find without shredding the software that gave the satellite life. This would force them to clean the satellites one by one to prevent interruption of the overall constellation, a massive, time-consuming process. In the end, a doppelgänger of Booth would root around, trying to locate what had caused the issue, but he would have little luck finding the protocol if he didn’t know where to look.

Theoretically.

His GPS gave a little beep, and he saw an icon of a Volkswagen Beetle centered directly over his hotel, blinking silently. On, off. On, off. Beckoning. Booth made up his mind.

He plugged the other GPS into the computer and waited for it to mate to the protocol. The GPS satellites were continuously circling the earth, and he needed to know which ones were overhead in order to only affect North America. It was a bit of a technological marvel that the average person took for granted when cursing their GPS, but the satellites broadcast an almanac of locational data that the little receiver then synchronized before searching the sky for the strongest signal.

He saw a string of numbers, labeled SVN 54, SVN 67, SVN 32, and continuing until all operational satellites were listed. He now knew the location of every one, and POLARIS synchronized the data. He turned to the laptop, engaging the “equalizer” button for North America but leaving the others alone.

He touched the “volume” dial until it showed six seconds, the timing packet used by the 2nd SOPS when working the constellation. His mouse icon hovering over the tuning dial, he debated on the degree of timing offset. He had no idea how effective his protocol was and wanted to be able to register a disruption with his crude little handheld GPS, so he went ahead and dialed it all the way to the right.

He connected to the Wi-Fi in his room, logging on to the Internet, then pulled up Tor, a browser package that utilized a volunteer network of computers that would randomize his ISP, preventing a searcher from knowing who he was or what he had sent over the Internet. He smiled at the irony of using something developed for the military to cloak his attack against that same body.

Once his computer had accessed the Boeing desktop in his little frigid trailer, he stroked the keys, turning off the Boeing firewall. Everything set, his mouse icon hovered over the power button to the virtual stereo deck. He glanced once more at the second GPS sitting in the window, seeing the car still blinking in the correct spot. He clicked “on.”

The little GPS blinked, then flashed the message, “Acquiring Satellites.” Two seconds later, it showed his location as somewhere in northern Canada. Two seconds after that, it went through the same process again, the icon ending up back at his hotel.

* * *

A quarter of a mile away, at the 7-Eleven on Tower Road, a man attempting to buy gas for his rental car received the message “Unable to complete transaction” from the fuel pump. He ran into the store to pay, dismayed at the line. He waited at the end, glancing at his watch every five seconds, growing more and more frustrated. The line didn’t move as the cashier tried to get her machines to function. He felt the time slip by and wondered if he would make his flight. He needn’t have worried.

* * *

On I-70, a mother desperately trying to reach the airport before her plane left heard her GPS say, “Recalculating.” Shoving a pacifier into her crying baby’s mouth, she unwittingly drove past her exit while it bounced back and forth. Seven seconds later, when it finished calculating, it ordered a U-turn, causing her to scream in frustration. She prayed her aircraft was delayed. Her prayer would be answered.

* * *

In the control tower of Denver International Airport, the largest airport in the United States by area and the fifth busiest by volume, the air-traffic controllers were hard at work synchronizing a dizzying array of fuel-laden flying bombs.

One of the first airports to be upgraded to the Federal Aviation Administration’s NextGen architecture for enhanced efficiency, it depended on GPS for accurate approach and takeoff instructions. Because NextGen was fairly new, the tower maintained the legacy radio guidance, should any receiver fail.

In the span of three seconds, every single receiver began sending false positioning codes. An unforeseen catastrophic event, the massive data conflict caused the mainframe computer to lock up, crashing every heads-up display and scope showing inbound and outbound traffic. The radio guidance continued to work flawlessly but was tied to a computer system that was no longer functioning.

The room filled with screaming voices as the air-traffic controllers tried to maintain separation of aircraft by eyesight alone, one man rebooting the system while another pulled an ancient set of binoculars from a closet.

At six thousand feet, United flight 762 continued to descend as instructed. On approach for landing, the captain correctly assumed that continuing with his last instructions was a better course of action than retaking to the sky with no one at the wheel in the tower.

On the ground before him a Cessna 182 took off, the new pilot inside trying to decipher all the shouting in his radio. Climbing higher and higher, the pilot of the Cessna never saw the wing of the Boeing 757 that crushed his cockpit like he was a gnat hitting a windshield. Never saw the 187 souls screaming on their way to earth. Never heard the captain grunting in the radio as he tried to get the plane to respond. Never felt the fireball that erupted when the aircraft sliced into the earth, spewing flaming jet fuel, luggage, and body parts.

* * *

Staring at his blinking little Volkswagen Beetle icon, Booth was very, very pleased. His code, created out of whole cloth and built in the dark of a basement, without any testing, had worked flawlessly. He giggled to himself at the number of inconveniences he had caused, wondering how many people across the United States had just heard that annoying little GPS voice. Or how many had had their ATM withdrawals spoiled, forcing them to start over after the six-second test.

He heard a siren and glanced out the window, noticing for the first time a giant black cloud growing from the airport.