Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

He set up his two GPSs in the windowsill, then showed Farooq the interface he had designed while they locked on.

Farooq said, “You must have Wi-Fi for this to work?”

“Yes. Well, you need to have Wi-Fi to load the settings.” He pointed toward a dial on a screen. “You can use this to delay the action. In other words, if I turned this dial, when I hit ‘send,’ the operation wouldn’t happen until the time I had set.”

Farooq nodded, and Booth said, “One thing about the time I forgot to mention. Not the time delay I was talking about, but the actual time of disruption. You need to be sure you set it to exactly what you want, because once it begins, you can’t turn it off. POLARIS is synced with the constellation itself, and the disruption also affects the program.”

Farooq said, “You will give me this computer? Is that what will happen?”

Booth said, “No, no. You need to bring another computer. This one is mine and has biometric safety features that only I can operate. It’s also got about four hundred different security tripwires. You try to mess with the program on this system, and you’ll end up formatting the hard drive, wiping out all traces of the protocol. I’ll have to transfer a clean copy of POLARIS to your own system.”

Booth heard the GPS chirp and quit talking. He tapped a few keys, received the almanac information, then the specific information of the satellites the GPS was tracking. He locked two of them into the interface, dialed up the timing offset, and said, “Watch the GPS on the right. The one with the car. See where the car is located?”

“Yes. Where we are now.”

“Watch what happens when I hit ‘send.’”

*

Captain Lisa Donnovan was the first to see the anomaly. As the Payload System Operator on duty in the control segment at Schriever, she was responsible for monitoring every signal in the entire GPS constellation. And she could not believe her bad luck.

Here we go again.

She had had the misfortune to be on duty for what was now being called the “blackout” the day before, and to say it had caused some consternation was an understatement. The echo went all the way to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with her trying to identify the problem while simultaneously answering questions thrown at her by a multitude of people.

She immediately notified the Mission Commander, who ordered a status from the other system operators on the floor. Like last time, the network and mechanical functioning of the satellites were fine. It was just the signal. Unlike last time, it was only two satellites.

She waited for the other satellites to start going crazy and relaxed when they didn’t. Her squadron commander appeared above her shoulder, firing questions. He didn’t remain long, and she knew why: He now had to report to higher, and she was glad it wasn’t her job.

The Mission Commander had the Satellite Vehicle Operator pull the two offending satellites and ordered them to try to replicate the event.

Everyone began working the issue, but like last time, they got nowhere. She felt like Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation trying to get the lights on his house to work but unable to find the magic switch.

The damn things just decided to put out a bad signal.

56

The light above the conference-room door began flashing, a red and white signal meaning someone uncleared needed to enter. Kurt Hale blacked his PowerPoint screen and quit talking.

An aide who looked to be about twelve came in, apologized, and ran over to the secretary of state, Jonathan Billings. After muttering a few words, he left again.

Billings said, “Sorry about that. Unfortunately, I have more going on than just this issue. Continue.”

Kurt turned on the Proxima projector. “As I was saying, the transfer was a success, and the Ghost is en route to Mexico City with Knuckles. Pike and the rest of the team are following in the Gulfstream. We’ve completed the initial interrogation of Hussein and have the instructions the Ghost is to follow once he gets there.”

“And you’re sure he’s not going to disappear?”

“Not if he wants to keep his feet.”

The secretary of defense said, “Billings, quit worrying about it. He’s only going to be on the ground for a couple of hours. Once he’s met them, we take them out.” He looked at Kurt. “Right?”

“Well, close,” Kurt said. “That was the original plan, but the instructions tell him to meet the Hezbollah guys first, then they’ll have a follow-on meeting with the American who has the hack. They want to ensure he’s who he says he is and that he’s got the money. They gave him some double-oh-seven instructions, full of tradecraft.”

The D/CIA said, “How long will that take?”

Kurt understood exactly where the question was directed. “We’ll still be within the window for Operation Gimlet. Shouldn’t be more than a day.”

Billings said, “Why would they do that? You’d think they would want to get the hack as fast as possible.”

“Because Hezbollah’s paranoid. I don’t know, maybe they’re worried that we’ll try to trick them with a plant.”

After the chuckling died down, Alexander Palmer said, “Okay, so we’re still tracking for Gimlet. What about exposure of the Taskforce? What’s the story on the YouTube video? Anything more?”

“We’re still getting probed, but we can’t pin it down. The real concern is that we’re getting probes on other cover organizations, including the Taskforce headquarters under Blaisdell Consulting. They’re making linkages somehow. Might just be guesswork, but with enough of that we could be in trouble. All they have to do is throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.”

The D/CIA said, “Great. This will be the Church Committee all over again. The press is going to explode with joy. And you know who’s going to get the brunt of this? Me. That’s who. It’s always the CIA that gets hauled in front of Congress.”

Kurt said, “We might have one lead. My guys have gone back and we did find an anomaly from right before all this started. We had some exploration into Grolier Recovery Services from an ISP in Colorado Springs. We don’t know the specific location, but it’s definitely Colorado Springs.”

The Sec Def said, “Not really. The flavor of the day is the NSA. My people.”

The D/CIA said, “And you think this is connected to the group Anonymous?”

“Better than that: I think it’s connected to this GPS issue. It’s way too much coincidence. I think we find the guy with the hack, and we find the YouTube people.”

“I don’t know about that. Seems like a stretch.”

Kurt said, “Schriever Air Force Base is in Colorado Springs. These probes began right before the first disruption. I don’t think it’s a stretch.”

“Say you’re right. How will you find them even if you capture the guy? I mean, they don’t call themselves ‘Anonymous’ for nothing. Your hackers can’t locate them through the digital trail, but you think this guy will be able to? He probably doesn’t even know their real names.”

“They had to talk somehow. We can’t find them through a digital trail going back from Grolier, but if we move forward from him, I bet it’s a different story.”

“Then what?”

“Then we take them down.”

Palmer said, “Huh? Here? In America?”

Kurt said, “Hell yes, here in America. Those little fucks are about to expose our most closely guarded secrets. They want to play with fire, I say let ’em get burned.”

The principals said nothing, looking back and forth to see if anyone agreed with the extreme measures before stepping into the water themselves. Finally, Billings said, “You know, Anonymous threatened Los Zetas a while back, and Los Zetas made an attempt to find them. When they said they were going to kill ten men for every person Anonymous exposed, the hackers backed off.”