Daniel Suarez - Influx

As McAllen drove down what seemed like miles of concrete-lined tunnels in an otherwise empty, chauffeured twelve-seat electric cart, he couldn’t stop thinking that this was where some of the last humans might remain alive in the event of global thermonuclear war. Or an asteroid strike. Or a pandemic—name your Armageddon, they probably had a standard-operating-procedures binder for it on a shelf somewhere down here. But the four times he’d been here in the past had been for COG training.

Today wasn’t training.

The cart stopped in the tunnel next to an open three-foot-thick steel blast door, flanked by armed sentries. He stepped off and was met by a female army lieutenant from the U.S. Army’s 114th Signal Battalion. “This way, Deputy Secretary.”

Without waiting for him, she moved quickly through bunkeresque office corridors devoid of people. He hurried to keep up. After walking past dozens of identical metal doors marked with numbers and letters, she finally turned a corner where a podium with the Pentagon seal stood on a dais before dozens of chairs. Several generations of television broadcasting equipment were mothballed against the back wall, but sitting in the chairs were lots of sharp-looking young men and women in suits, tapping away at laptops. None of them so much as glanced up.

The lieutenant gestured for McAllen to follow her as she approached a conference room flanked by two more armed sentries. She knocked and after a moment entered, moving aside for McAllen.

“Deputy Secretary McAllen is here, Madam Director.”

“Bill!”

In the concrete-walled boardroom McAllen could see several senior representatives of the DHS, NSA, CIA, and Defense Department sitting around a huge and absurdly durable-looking oak table. At its head sat their penultimate boss, Director of National Intelligence Kaye Monahan, a petite woman in her sixties who nonetheless had a commanding presence. McAllen was well aware this small woman had, as U.S. ambassador, more than held her own in brass-knuckle dealings with the Chinese senior leadership. She’d been in the intel community long before that. And she was principled—which McAllen found appealing in a longtime D.C. political player.

The army lieutenant departed, closing the door behind her. There was a vigorous debate already under way around the conference table.

Director Monahan motioned for him to sit in an open seat next to her. “Come here and help me talk some sense into these guys.”

McAllen took his seat while the raucous discussion continued.

“Kaye, you know damn well no one has the complete picture. That’s what compartmentalization’s all about.” The deputy director of the CIA was a jowly Virginian in his sixties, sipping a Diet Coke as he scowled across the table.

“Compartmentalizing an SAP is one thing, but a whole goddamned bureau?”

A gaunt, intense man, whom McAllen remembered from his days at the NSA, spoke from the far end of the table. “It wasn’t a bureau back when it started. It was a project. And in any event, it was the Company that launched it.”

The CIA guy cast a look at him. “It could just as well have been any of us.”

Director Monahan added, “I never heard anything about it while I was at Langley. I knew we had black tech, but…”

The CIA guy gestured to the walls. “Look around you. This is what they were doing in the Cold War—big stuff. Do you realize how much two hundred billion a year for half a century buys you? The president himself doesn’t have the clearance to know about half these programs. There are a million people with top-secret classifications in this country, Kaye. And some of those folks live in a completely different world—even from us. It’s the nature of the covert sector. Back in the ’60s someone put the BTC in charge of regulating advanced technologies, and it snowballed. It looks like they left us all behind.”

She sipped coffee from an absurdly elegant cup and saucer—legacy ware from the Kennedy administration. “Well, Bill here took the meeting with them—if that’s what you could call it—and I just about had him and the other two certified when I read his report.”

The NSA guy remained expressionless. “I read it. We’ve known since ’98 that the BTC had perfected holographic projection at molecular scales. We think it’s done with phased array optics and plasma emission. But no one really knows.”

McAllen raised his eyebrows. “It looked damned real to us.”

The CIA guy grimaced. “That’s a toy compared to what else they have.”

Monahan scowled. “There needs to be some accountability. We need to review what technology they’re sitting on that could provide the United States with a technological edge. China’s nipping at our heels.”

“The BTC might argue that what they’re doing is keeping the tech out of China’s hands.”

“There is a technology transfer problem in the private sector.”

She put the cup and saucer down. “Well, pardon me, Mike, but I like a bit less authoritarianism in my democracy. The BTC wasn’t put in charge of policing the world.”

“Who’s to stop them?”

“They might have advanced technology, but if we bring CIA, DOD, NSA, and DHS together—focus our collective efforts—we should be able to bring them to heel.”

The NSA and CIA guys exchanged looks.

“Good luck with that.”

The NSA guy shook his head. “You’re forgetting that they provide a good deal of valuable intelligence to the three-letter crowd. Rumor is that they’ve made some serious advances in quantum computing and communications. Maybe even human-level AIs.”

“This is ridiculous.”

CIA spoke grimly. “You’re not going to sneak up on them. They’ve compromised ECHELON, SWICS—just about everything. They’re in your network, too. Count on it. They’re reading your emails, Kaye.”

The NSA man shrugged. “They seem to be able to break any code. That’s probably why they always seem to know about what’s going on and where. We need to keep them on our side.”

“How would you even know if they are? I’ve heard that the BTC has splintered into overseas factions now.”

“Look, you’re stirring up a shit storm.”

Monahan frowned. “We need to find where they moved their operations, and we need to act.”

The NSA guy just stared. “Knowing their base of operations isn’t going to help you.”

“Of course it is. We could start monitoring their activities, just like they monitor ours. We could set up an air gap network they don’t know about. Another SAP.”

“This is how it starts…”

The NSA man sighed. “Knowing where they are didn’t help us.”

“You know where they’re headquartered?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you: Their headquarters is in the middle of downtown Detroit. A forty-story building from the ’60s that’s so bland you barely see it.”

“In Detroit?”

“You wanna hide the world’s most advanced technology center where no one will find it—where else do you put it? But let me save you some headaches: They don’t communicate in the electromagnetic spectrum, or fiber, or any other technology known to us. We’ve had receivers focused on that building for decades. Nothing. So we tried to cut in. Did seismic work and found that their building goes sixty stories underground—that we know of.”

“Sixty stories?”

“That’s not all. Our whole team disappeared right after we scanned it. That same day the spy satellite we were focusing on them went AWOL. And then all the data we had on them disappeared from our network, too. Replaced by photos of our children asleep in bed—taken from inside our homes.”

“We need to figure out some way to rein them in.”

“Risky. You won’t find it in any reports, but this has been tried before. Talk to some retired directors. When it comes to the BTC, you’re not just playing with fire; you’re playing with plutonium, Kaye.”