Mark Young - Off the grid

Gerrit leaned over. “What are you planning?” He watched the screen come alive, and a familiar site appeared on the monitor. “NSA? How’d you…?”

Joe didn’t answer for a moment as he punched in a series of codes. “The bad guys have their people and we have ours.” It looked like his uncle opened up a second program. Once on the screen, it appeared Joe had entered a chat room. Only two people logged in. Joe was obviously one of them. Both active users used a series of numbers as identifiers. “I’m requesting resources to be available when we land. And a search of communications traffic between known identifiers used by Kane-cell phones, IP addresses, the works. I need to find out what information Kane has been trying to access. And what information came to him.”

His uncle worked quietly for a few minutes, then paused as if waiting for a response. “I’ve tried to hold back on this because I am concerned that Kane might have piggybacked his communications with a code that would alert him if anyone else tried to track him. But we need to move forward, particularly since we now know a little about what he’s up to.”

“Which is what? Trying to find us?”

Joe shook his head. “In the grand scheme of things, we’re small potatoes to him. Just irritating flies. Something to be swatted out of the way while he works on bigger things.”

“Do you know what he’s working on?”

“Remember that project Megiddo?”

“The thing Dad stumbled on?”

“Exactly. After they were…after your parents died, I began searching for a connection between what your dad told me and what happened to your folks. After I re-created myself, I began to develop trusted contacts within the government and business, those I felt I could depend on.”

“That’s hard to determine, isn’t it? I mean, almost anybody can be bought or rolled.”

Joe leaned back and squinted. “My, that is a very cynical outlook on God’s creatures.”

Gerrit stared back. “Tell me I’m wrong, Joe. Tell me there are a lot of people out there you can trust. I mean, truly trust. People who can’t be bought, compromised, or just simply paid off to rat on their own mother. It’s just the way of mankind.”

Joe looked at him for a moment, then leaned over the laptop. “Well, unlike you, I feel I can trust those I befriended over the years. Those I learned to trust in one way or another.”

His uncle watched a response come over the screen. “Anyway, I cross-referenced everything your dad worked on and compared it to Kane’s life-his business interests, government connections, his communications I could unscramble. Everything.”

The jet hit an air pocket and fell for a few seconds. Finally, the aircraft leveled out and Gerrit slowly unclenched his armrest. “So, did you find a lead?”

“Not really. I knew he was interested in the scientific fields your father and I studied. But specifically, no, I didn’t find anything. There may be only one place we can get our hands on that information.”

“You mean…”

Joe nodded. “Harrogate. It wasn’t until he took you to that location that I realized its strategic importance. Not just its proximity to NSA’s largest tracking installation in the world, part of ECHELON, with access to all the major world power’s intelligence data. But Kane’s mansion could become a central clearinghouse for whatever the Megiddo Project sought or a launching site to other locations, other host servers. Plugging into NSA’s communications network like some neighbor who runs an electrical cord to your house to tap electricity. Except Kane may have become a part of the household, so to speak. Some very well-connected people may have allowed him to tap into their network from his place at Harrogate. People with the same political agenda-globalization at all costs.

“It wasn’t until we tracked you to his place in England that I began to put it together. At least I could guess where he was storing his data and information-none of which was going out over the Internet. That’s when I realized he directed the operation in face-to-face encounters with people, very seldom risking exposure by using technology to communicate his ideas and orders. At least until this project Megiddo.”

“What changed?” Gerrit leaned back, watching as his uncle continued to search online.

Joe finally glanced up. “Say we’re facing a threat of a major WWIII kind of war across the globe. First, military leaders will break down the war into chunks of arenas, say Europe, Asia, North America, etcetera. Within each of these arenas, lines must be drawn and battles waged. But even before all this happens, a massive intelligence operation must be up and running to feed critical information to the command staff, to establish a network of assets and sources, and to acquire vital information about the enemy’s tactics, capabilities, and strategy.”

Gerrit nodded. “I understand. So, Project Megiddo-”

“Exactly, they are going to use Megiddo to build this massive intelligence base in order to launch an offensive.”

“How can they possibly hope to coordinate this on a worldwide front?”

“Through technology used under the operation name of Project Megiddo. At least that’s my suspicion. Somehow, Kane’s people-or other co-opted scientists-have created a kind of network of proxy servers on steroids, using some kind of quantum-computer breakthrough. I think that is what your dad suspected and began to collect information to prove it.”

“I thought we were years away from any usable breakthrough in quantum computers.”

Joe shook his head. “We’re closer than you think. For example, IBM financed a research group at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, to actively pursue advances made at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. University researchers believe that standard microelectronics manufacturing technologies can offer quantum computing using superconducting materials like rhenium or niobium. They face many obstacles, but their findings have been very exciting.”

“So,” Gerrit said, following his uncle’s logic, “if Kane’s people have made a breakthrough with quantum computers, they can use this capability to develop an intelligence-gathering tool no one else can match.”

Joe looked at him with concern. “That’s my point. I believe they already have set up a host of proxy servers to handle and filter all the data they glean from NSA’s system. In some ways, they don’t even need NSA; it just makes their search parameters quicker and more efficient. By linking these servers, using quantum capabilities, they can virtually gain access to any system in the world, break it down, manipulate that system, and extract whatever they desire for their own use. And they can do this without leaving a trace in the host server.”

Gerrit whistled. “Like using stealth bombers without anyone ever realizing they were there.”

Joe nodded. “I believe they have reverse proxies-you know, a computer that appears to be an ordinary server to users-to enable encryption protocols like TLS and SSL to be neutralized and allow access to any secure website they choose. God only knows how they plan on using this information.”

“I have some good ideas how they might use it. They can gather dirt on anyone, turn them, and then use these assets to gain political and military power. We have to expose this.”

“We’ve got to break into Kane’s place in Harrogate to get a better picture of what he’s up to.”

“Are you suggesting we somehow sneak into that place to steal whatever he’s working on?” Gerrit looked around the plane. “With this crew? That’s crazy, Joe.”

Alena glared at him. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Gerrit.”