Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

The general was already Googling Churchill Downs: an inch of precipitation in the last twelve hours.

“The eight horse,” Aussie told him, “is a good mudder. So put a packet on him if you want to make a bundle.”

“I don’t know,” said the general, feigning disinterest should his phone be tapped by any of the myriad agencies that were now watching their own citizens more closely than ever before in the ongoing war against terror. “There must be other nags in that race who can run in the mud, Aussie.”

“Yeah, but not like this one. Jockey told me this horse loves the mud, digs deep, no slipping and sliding. The mother of all mudders, General.”

“I don’t know,” the general repeated. “Unlike you Aussies, I’m not the betting type. A ticket in the Power-ball now and then, maybe, but you know what they say about the lotteries.”

“Yeah, yeah, tax on the stupid. Our mate Choir’s been singing that song to me for years. ’Course he doesn’t gamble,” continued Aussie sarcastically. “He invests . But he’s not on my case today. He’s got one hell of a hangover from last night, and has to hightail it to catch a flight back to — where’s that burg he lives in in Washington?” It wasn’t a burg, it was a small township nestled in the hills on the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains.

“Winthrop,” the general answered, and answered jokingly, “He’s not sick already?”

Choir Williams, one of the toughest of the tough in Special Forces, having been trained first by the British SAS, Special Air Service, at Brecon Beacons in Wales. He was notorious for getting motion sickness. Choir, they used to joke, would get sick on an early-morning dew, but, like his grandfather and so many others who’d been violently ill on that gray, ugly morning of June 6, 1944, in Normandy, once he was in action, it was the enemy’s turn to suffer.

“He’ll be fine,” said Aussie, rubbing it in. “I’ll give ’im a coupla greasy fried eggs ’fore he leaves.”

Choir’s terse response could be heard in the background.

“You be sure to make the bet, General,” Aussie pressed. “The eight horse. I guarantee it.”

“Oh,” came the general’s retort. “So you’ll give me a refund if it doesn’t win or place?”

“Stone the crows!” said Aussie. “I’m not that stupid.”

“I’ll think about it, Aussie. Thanks for calling.”

When Freeman hung up, he scribbled “8, Churchill Downs” on his bedside Post-it pad and got up to spin the Rolodex file for the team’s letter-for-number code that had been disguised on one of the three-by-five-inch index cards. The cards contained everything from specs about the new weapons coming out of DARPA to the dimensions of the new Wasp-class carriers of the kind that the team had used on earlier missions and which housed helos and vertical takeoff and Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. The Rolodex also held the specifications for the object that looked like a marking pen that the general nearly always carried in his shirt pocket when out of the house.

Consulting the Rolodex’s file for this day’s one-time pad — that is, this day’s number-for-letter code — he wrote down a seven-digit number prefixed by a three-number area code. But to make sure his end was as secure as Aussie’s had been, the general would now have to use a landline outside the house. He knew the NSA had hired hundreds of Arab-speaking translators post-9/11, but he suspected some Arab agents must have slipped through the net, using the NSA’s intercepts for their own intelligence networks. Such was the paranoia of the world after 9/11.

He grabbed his Windbreaker and zipped it up, feeling a stiff breeze coming off the ocean, and headed down to the 7-Eleven again. He stood impatiently while a lanky, dirty-haired, earring-in-tongue youth of about twenty, who could see that the general was anxious to get on the phone, turned his back on Freeman and proceeded to loll against the wall of the phone booth, indulging himself in a long, banal conversation with his girlfriend, the communication consisting of repetition of “y’know” and “totally” and “like.” Like the general would, you know, like to pull the insolent son of a bitch right out of the phone booth and totally put him in the Marine Corps; give him a Parris Island haircut, feed him to the drill instructors, and teach the kid a few manners.

The youth was picking his teeth with a broken fingernail as the general left, cooling down, telling himself he’d been through his own rebellious time as a young man, but assuring himself that he’d not put anything in his body that didn’t belong there. As his self-righteous mood abated, he walked off to another phone booth four blocks away to dial the number Aussie had given him.

“Hello?” It sounded like Aussie, but there was a lot of static on the line.

“Clear?” intoned the general.

“Clear,” came the reply.

The general hesitated. As his old Special Forces outfit knew, he was a stickler for details. It wasn’t only his normal disposition that made him so but the experience of having a mission in Iraq compromised because of an English-speaking insurgent having successfully imitated a U.S. Ranger, calling down mortar rounds on U.S. positions. The interloper had used only “clear” instead of the full “clear fore and aft,” but had sounded so much like an American that the SpecFor team had taken out four Rangers before realizing they’d been set up for a blue on blue. And so the general, although he was 90 percent sure it was Aussie on the other end, said, “Clear is insufficient reply. I say again, clear is insufficient reply.” The static increased. The general heard, “Clear fore and aft.”

“What’s up?” asked the general, still on guard. Since 9/11, nothing was safe — voice mail, e-mail, snail mail, and especially text of any kind. What was it J. P. Morgan had advised? “Never write anything down.”

“Got a phone message this afternoon. From an old girlfriend of ours.”

“Yes?” said Freeman. The static eased up, but then surged.

“Well, she said she couldn’t talk earlier because of the pressure of work.”

The general still felt uneasy, the static doing nothing to abate his lingering suspicion.

So, thought Freeman, Homeland Security or the FBI had gotten to Marte.

“What did she say?” asked Freeman, maintaining a casual, almost bored, tone.

“She said she wished she could have explained more but that her brother had been in the room.”

“Uh-huh,” said Freeman. Big Brother. A CNN boss? Or a DHS official?

“Did she like the card I sent her?” It was the team’s phrase for more information.

“Oh yeah. She said it was a little sentimental but every word was true. She loved hearing your story about Eleanor Roosevelt, the French fries, and that kid who told her she had such big ears.”

Freeman was so keen to jot down the message, he had at first mistakenly taken out the fake DARPA marking pen from his shirt pocket instead of the regular ballpoint before reminding himself of the “no text” rule. He’d have to commit it to memory.

“Oh yeah,” said the general, laughing casually. “I remember that incident — cheeky damn kid. Where was that? On the campaign trail for FDR down in Louisiana?”

“No, you’re way off.” It was said good-naturedly. “No, remember, the story was that she was flying out west for FDR and it was some VIP’s kid on the plane who insulted her.”

“Yeah,” said Freeman in the tone of one who was just now recalling the full details of an old joke. “And she says to the cheeky kid, ‘Never mind my ears. Your nose is longer than a French fry,’ right?”

“That was it. But I never believed that bit about her saying that to the kid. From what I remember of my history lessons, Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t like that. So, okay, she mightn’t have looked like a Hollywood film starlet, but she was a kind woman and she did a hell of a lot for this country. She was FDR’s right-hand woman, right?”