Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“Right,” said Freeman, committing these three things to memory: Eleanor Roosevelt, the kid’s supposed comment about her “big ears,” and “French fries.” None of these words used by Aussie were likely to trigger automatic NSA, FBI, or DHS phone taps. Besides, the computer-heavy NSA, quite apart from the DHS and the FBI, simply didn’t have enough manpower. The computers were programmed so that certain giveaway phrases such as “terrorist,” “assassination,” “attack,” and “the Great Satan” would automatically trigger an NSA computer to record the conversation for later analysis. On the off chance that any terrorist infiltrator from any of the security agencies had been plugged in, neither Freeman nor Aussie had made any reference to a DARPA breaking and entering. And Eleanor Roosevelt, French fries, and big ears weren’t the kind of words that would alert NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

“Gotta go,” said Aussie. “Someone else wants to use this phone.”

Back at the house, the general brewed another cup of “velvet Java,” as he liked to call the smooth, black liquid that dripped from Margaret’s old but thorough filtration system. As he waited for his favorite Pyrex glass mug to fill, the one with the faded insignia of his old Third Army on it, he mused over three things. First, Aussie’s mention of “an old girlfriend of ours” clearly referred to Marte Price. Second, she had felt her message urgent and sensitive enough to call Aussie Lewis, whose number she would have from one of her interviews with the general’s team following one of their celebrated raids. And third, she wanted to get the message to Freeman quickly without phoning him directly, having eschewed e-mail, snail mail, or courier service — all of which could be, and were being, opened under the Patriot Act. If DHS and the other agencies had come down on her so hard about this “nonstory,” then they were certainly going to check any e-mail or phone calls from and to her office and home. She had done the smart thing, obviously having left the office, and chosen a landline to call Aussie. But what in hell did her message mean? He shook his head in ironic acknowledgement of the odd, ofttimes mundane, names that had been used to hide military secrets and the turning points of history: “Climb Mount Nikita,” the three words that launched the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and the names Juno, Sword, Omaha, Utah, and Gold, the designations of the four beaches used in the Allied invasion of Normandy, and, for Freeman, the moving line of Paul Verlaine’s poetry, “…blessent mon couer d’une langueur monotone” —“…wound my heart with a monotonous languor”—being the long-awaited signal that galvanized the Maquis, the French Resistance, to rise en masse against the Nazis. At least Freeman now realized that the original B and E story was true, and that Aussie’s phone message from Marte Price was trying to help him identify the base.

All right, then, how about Eleanor Roosevelt? What did her name signify in history? Freeman remembered how Marte had once lamented to him that one of the most depressing things in her career as an investigative reporter and news anchor was discovering just how ignorant Americans are of history. Not only the history of far-off places such as Iraq but the history of our own country as well. And, she’d noted, the ignorance wasn’t confined to the United States. She’d told him how she’d had to cover the visit of one of Canada’s former prime ministers, Paul Martin, who was giving a televised speech at a military base to celebrate the D-Day landings in Normandy but who called it the “invasion of Norway.” And there was the Canadian cabinet minister who didn’t know the difference between France’s pro-Nazi Vichy government and the famous Battle of Vimy Ridge in World War I, where the Canadians had charged and broken the German line. But Marte hadn’t told him anything special, or at least anything that he could remember, about Eleanor Roosevelt. And what on earth had she to do with Aussie’s mention of French fries and big ears? Freeman, an avid history buff, had never heard such a story about FDR’s wife, and believed that a child’s supposed insult to the first lady was a red herring that Aussie had dropped into the conversation merely to get the phrase “big ears” into the message. The general had considered the possibility that a callow youth could have actually said something so rude and hurtful to the first lady; there had certainly been a lot of cruel, if unpublished, allusions to her looks during the war by many who had opposed FDR. It had been bad enough that FDR had polio, the scourge of his generation, and was in iron leg braces and a wheelchair, the press having had a gentleman’s agreement that they would never photograph the leg braces or focus in too closely on the two Secret Service men who had to stand by the president at every function, holding him by cupping his elbows. Marte and Freeman had talked about that little-known historical fact and how JFK’s severe back pain and his Addison’s disease had also been kept from the public.

Freeman smiled affectionately at the memory of their chat about FDR, and he did recall Marte pointing out how the first lady had done so much good, not only for the wartime generation but for everyone, how the guy in the street, like his father, had loved FDR, the man in the wheelchair who had served the longest term, more than thirteen years, of any U.S. president, and who had led America out of the terrible years of the Depression. He had stood up against Hitler and helped save England, despite the pervasive mood of isolationism against him, and had vowed to stop the stomach-turning brutality that was the modus operandi of the marauding empire of Japan. And through it all, Eleanor, like so many uncomplaining wives, had borne her husband’s darkness with him and had become indispensable.

Freeman had been Googling the Net for “Eleanor Roosevelt,” “French fries,” and “big ears” connections all afternoon. By the time the evening news came on, he was getting a headache from staring at the flickering screen. Nothing about any break-in at a military base. He remembered Watergate; that had started to unwind because a B and E had been reported. The story that was grabbing TV headlines this day was another “worm” attack on the Net. Some jerk, working for a big corporation, had left a port open on his laptop and the perpetrator had downloaded the worm into the corporation’s mainframes. Once more he went to his laptop, bringing up databases for Eleanor Roosevelt and cross-referencing keywords from them with defense-based links. What he found were “umpteen” entries, as Margaret would have described them if she were still speaking to him.

Eleanor Roosevelt had sure traveled. He Googled “big ears” specifically on the defense contractor linkages. Nothing. There was an “Ears,” or rather “Golden Ears” provincial park in Canada not that far north of the big sub base at Bangor on Washington state’s Hood Canal, but there were no references indicating a joint U.S.-Canadian armed forces base. But when he saw that this provincial park, the equivalent of a state park in the United States, was landlocked, he thought of a possibility so obvious he was embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. Was it possible that there was a navy DARPA base somewhere inland in the United States? It didn’t make sense, but he ran it. There were only a few, but one of them was in Idaho. Potatoes? French fries? A possibility.

He zoomed in. It was situated on a lake, Pend Oreille, in the Idaho panhandle, thirty-six miles northeast of Spokane. Spokane itself was east of semi-arid desert country, much of it now irrigated, but Pend Oreille was in a thickly forested valley between the eight-thousand-foot-high Bitterroot Range and the Cabinet Mountains wilderness area which, the general noted, placed the lake between northeastern Washington and northwestern Montana in an area that thousands of years ago had been deeply scoured by glaciers. Then the computer crashed. Why, he had no idea, but it forced him to curb his excitement, having to admit, with a crossword puzzle addict’s reluctance, that even if he was correct in his assumption that Idaho was a key to unlocking Marte’s message, it was still only one of three clues he’d been given, and nothing was making sense. He needed to know more before he could call National Security adviser Eleanor Prenty with his theory that someone was trying to kill a story about a B and E just as someone in the Nixon administration had tried to kill Watergate.