Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

He’d expected a pleasant office, like the ones that had been used on his prior visits. Instead, he found himself led down a long corridor and into a sealed examination room. He was still puzzling over this when the staffer vanished out of the door and the room sealed behind him with an audible thump. A moment later, a stern voice came out of nowhere.

“Remove all clothing and personal possessions,” it ordered.

Toby bit down the comment that came to mind and slowly undressed. Coming from a large family, he had few taboos about being naked in front of strangers — and besides, he could be reasonably sure that the NSA would only have male officers peering at him. The thought wasn’t much reassurance as he removed his pants and boxers, dumping them all into the marked tray at one side of the room. They would be held in storage for him once he returned from the bowels of Fort Meade, he assumed. There was no way that they could charge him with anything, for the very simple reason that he hadn’t done anything. It still made him feel slightly guilty.

A door hissed open at the other end of the room. “Proceed through the door and lie down on the table,” the voice ordered. “Lie on your back.”

The cold air wafting through the doorway didn’t help Toby’s nerves. Unexplained security procedures were always bad news. “What are you going to do?” He asked, as he entered the second room. It looked like a medical examination chamber, although it was surprisingly bare, with only a small set of equipment in one corner. “Stick fingers up my butt to prove that I’m not hiding anything there?”

The voice, not surprisingly, failed to rise to the bait. Instead, a man wearing a protective suit appeared out of yet another door, his face hidden behind a mirrored surface on his mask. Toby braced himself as the man pressed what looked like an oversized hypodermic needle against his shoulder, expecting to feel the needle entering his skin. Instead, there was a brief sucking sensation and then the masked man stepped back, apparently satisfied. He slipped out of the door before Toby could sit up, the doorway closing and vanishing amidst the room’s white-painted walls. Toby knew the door was there and yet he couldn’t pick it out from the wall.

A third door opened at the far end. “Proceed through the doorway and dress yourself,” the voice ordered. “You will be met once you have cleared the sterile environment.”

Toby scowled, but did as he was told. A small pile of clothing awaited him; a simple military-style tunic, with a pair of underpants. There was nothing else; his original set of clothes would have to wait until he left the building. When he had finished dressing, a final door hissed open, revealing a small waiting room. Four people stood there, waiting for him. Toby was surprised to realise that he recognised three of them; the fourth was a complete stranger. But in hindsight, it should have been obvious. Someone was clearly taking security very seriously.

Director Nimitz of the National Security Agency was a tall thin man, with a pale face and sallow features that had led some of his subordinates to whisper that he was a vampire. He was renowned for having no sense of humour, but then he’d reached his present post as the result of a complete failure in intelligence that had cost his predecessor his career. The NSA was the most secretive of government agencies and the thought of actually revealing their — much-hyped — capabilities to the great unwashed, which included every other intelligence agency in the world, was anthemia to its officers.

Toby spared a smile for the person standing next to him. Gillian Baskin was a blonde woman with an unbelievably perky smile, which concealed the sharpest mind Toby had ever encountered. They’d been pushed together when the President had ordered Toby to handle liaison with the intelligence communities — something he found uncomfortable — and Gillian had been assigned to brief him. Toby had asked her out to dinner a couple of times, but their relationship had remained strictly professional. He couldn’t really blame her. The operatives who served in her position couldn’t risk even the slightest hint that they might have been compromised.

The CIA Director opened the meeting, once they’d walked into a small conference room and been served cups of steaming coffee. “Mr Sanderson, this is Sir Charles Hanover, the Deputy Director of MI5,” he said. “I’m sorry for the cloak and dagger routine, but we needed to talk under strict security. We may have a serious problem on our hands.”

Toby nodded, taking a sip of his coffee. There were few places that could be deemed absolutely secure — particularly to TEMPEST standards — but Fort Meade’s underground complex was one of them. So were the White House Situation Room and a number of other facilities, some of them so heavily classified that Toby was barely even aware of their existence. The experts in the NSA had staked their reputations that the complexes — and their computer systems, light years ahead of computers in the public sector — were absolutely secure. It was impossible to signal out of a secure room — and any attempt to do so would be detected.

“Over the past three days, our counter-surveillance systems” — he didn’t go into details; some of them were so highly classified that even the President had no need to know — “picked up a number of disturbing transmissions from Washington. Gillian?”

Gillian’s cool voice echoed in the silent room. “I’ll spare you the technical details,” she said. “Suffice it to say that the transmissions were focused on a very high frequency and ultra-compressed; each transmission lasted little longer than a microsecond. Our first assumption was that we had stumbled over a nest of foreign spies within the capital and started attempting to track them down, while analysing their signal transmissions in the hope of understanding how it was done. It didn’t take more than a few hours to determine that the transmissions were utterly impossible to crack.”

Toby sucked in his breath sharply. The NSA had dropped most of its objections to commercially-owned encryption programs, secure in the knowledge that most of them could be decrypted by the NSA, even without a copy of the secure key used to encode the message before it was sent. Everyone knew that the NSA intercepted transmissions from all over the world, cracking Russian, Chinese and even European encryption schemes and giving the American intelligence community unprecedented access into the minds of their potential opponents. The network of quantum computers held in Fort Meade could decrypt anything, if only through brute force decryption. No one on Earth possessed more advanced computers than the NSA.

His blood ran cold. On Earth…

Gillian nodded, following his train of thought. “It was surprisingly easy to locate the sources of the transmissions,” she said. She tapped a control pad hidden on her side of the table and a slide appeared on the wall. Toby frowned. It was a pinkish background, with a tiny silver object on top of it. The detail seemed almost blurred.

“That is pretty much the maximum magnification we can give it,” Gillian added. “We removed that device from your arm.”

Toby looked down, remembering the oversized needle that had been pressed against his skin. There hadn’t been anything there, had there? But then, diseases and germs were too small for the human eye to see… and they could be lethal. He hadn’t had the slightest idea that anything was there.

“I see,” he said, as calmly as he could. Inwardly, he was reeling. “How big is it?”

“Just a hair or two above true nanotechnology-size,” Gillian said. “I don’t think I have to explain just how dangerous this could be.”