John Nance - Lockout

She looked up from what was apparently deep thought and shook her head as she shrugged her shoulders.

“Frankly, I’m not sure. Ten minutes ago we were fixing to go back over everything we knew… or thought we knew… about the signals, and Will Bronson gets a text, immediately makes some lame excuse, and he’s on his feet thanking me for nothing and then evaporating.”

Seth came in, closed the door behind him, and sat down, looking concerned. “So, what did you find together?”

Jenny sighed and tossed the papers she’d been holding on the table. “We validated my theory that the signal sequence is an echo that has been apparently piggybacking on several dozen communication satellites around the globe. That, in itself, is a pretty good trick, requiring some very creative programming, and I told him that, in my opinion, this isn’t something you can set up in a matter of days. Chances are, the transponders involved have been quietly prepped for many months… maybe years.”

“Prepped in what way?”

“Quietly reprogrammed from the ground to carry this mystery signal on their normal datastreams from an existing transponder whenever it receives a carefully coded order. But Seth, what I haven’t discovered is, where is the mother burst coming from? I was working to pinpoint it when the signals stopped. I’ll have to go into the historic data now.”

“Geographically, you mean?”

“Yeah. Where’s the uplink coming from? That might give us a clue as to who’s behind it. “

“Wait, Jenny, you said the signals stopped ?”

“Yes!” she scooted her chair toward him in excitement, an index finger in the air. “There was what appeared to be an answering burst, then an acknowledgement, then nothing. We ran a series of signal comparisons and found that the programming message changed after the answering burst.”

“Something responded?”

“Yes, just about three hours ago. Some station somewhere accepted the programming order, or at least that’s what we assume happened. So, just like I said before, the question eating at me is: What entity or machine has been told to do or not to do something? See, if this wasn’t nefarious, why the hell would someone go to this extreme to keep the process coded and secret?”

“Was there any sudden breakthrough idea you came up with or some suggestion made that might have triggered our DIA man’s departure?”

“No. Just the message he received. I didn’t get to read it. And suddenly he’s evacuating. At least it felt like an evacuation.”

Seth Zieglar shook his head. “Well… my guess is something much more dramatic just came up. And I’ll bet… if we did a little digging on the current classified alert channels…”

She was already brightening. “Yeah! Got it. I’ll dive in.”

“Tomorrow, Jen. Tomorrow you dive in. You should go home now. You do have one of those, right?”

“One of what?” she said, puzzled.

“A home. I seem to recall a long suffering cat in your life.”

“Oh, that would be Duke. But he’s okay alone. He only dies of malnutrition if I’m gone more than a week.”

“Lucky cat.”

“Lemme work late on this, Seth.”

“You can if you want, but… is this going to help us?”

“Don’t know. Can’t tell. Want to keep digging.”

“It gets spooky around here late at night.”

“I know, but I’m not alone.”

Seth pulled himself to his feet and waved. “Okay. Have a great evening! I’ll be home if you uncover the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“What? I don’t think I understand.”

“Just… a joke. Don’t stay so late tonight that you don’t make it in tomorrow on time, okay?”

“Got it,” she said.

Ten minutes later, a fresh coffee in hand, Jenny settled back into her work station and keyed up one of the secure intelligence channels just as the phone rang with Seth on the other end, his voice, she thought, a touch too cheerful.

“Okay, Jenny, mystery solved. Our Mr. Bronson just called my cell phone and essentially said it turns out to be a classified DOD thing, and don’t worry, he’ll explain later, and thanks so much for the help. He said he was greatly impressed by you.”

“You’re on your cell phone, right?” she asked, well aware that somewhere in their own NSA building their words were flowing into an immense datastream recording bank and being examined for trigger words or phrases. The public might have been exempted now from phone monitoring but definitely not NSA personnel.

“That would be a correct assumption. In any event, unless you just want to stay and play video games, go home. Nothing to see here.”

“You’re sure?” she probed, evaluating the nuances of his reply and the time he took to speak it.

“We… have no reason… of which I am currently aware… to not take our compatriots at their word. So… unless it’s making up for what you didn’t get done today on normal tasks, go home.”

“Uh, huh. Okay. G’night Seth.”

“Likewise.”

She disconnected the line and stared at the phone’s screen for the better part of a minute. What the hell was that? She’d worked for Seth long enough to know his vocal patterns, and that was a very stressed version of her boss. Stressed and unnatural.

Jenny shivered involuntarily, wondering what kind of interdepartmental intrigue would cause a chain reaction like she was apparently witnessing: DIA doing strange things and perhaps causing Seth to make calls to her with information she inherently couldn’t trust.

I’d make a terrible spy, she concluded. I’d see duplicity everywhere. Hell, I DO see duplicity everywhere.

The memory of a close encounter with a psychologist two years before swam unbidden into her consciousness. She’d thought she’d found a clandestine ring of spies within the confines of her own department, and the suspicion had grown to unbearable proportions before Seth and his boss had in essence done an intervention to calm her down. Paranoid tendencies, the doctor had cautioned her, could be fanned by such thinking. Seth should not have used that word with her, ever… although she wasn’t sure the diagnosis had ever been shared with him. It embarrassed her terribly, especially when the Snowden case erupted and for a few hours she thought he was a validation of her suspicions—until it turned out he was from an entirely different department and a contractor to boot.

Jenny looked back at the computer screen and re-focused. The secure channel was still blinking and the flag indicating a breaking bulletin had popped up, an initial alert regarding a commercial flight that had suddenly reversed course off the west coast of Ireland and might be a hijacking. She glanced at it passively as she mentally replayed Seth’s call.

A sudden wave off from the Defense Intelligence Agency had been phoned not through channels, but to Seth’s cell phone. And Bronson not calling her meant what? An insult? A determination to prevent her from knowing anything more? Had she suggested something that worried them? And if the programmer and the programmed were both DOD entities, why the hell hadn’t the Defense Intelligence team known that themselves when they walked in? Surely Bronson didn’t need a team of people wasting an afternoon just to ferret out the little that she knew. He could have had that information for the asking.

Or, she smiled to herself, for dinner and a little intimate persuasion. Two glasses of wine and a few kisses, and I’d sing like a canary!

She forced herself back to the serious mode.

No, it felt like a turf thing, and she was used to tug of wars between intelligence agencies that were supposed to be fighting for the same team. Such had been going on from time immemorial.