As they drove out onto the runway Hollis pulled a small fire extinguisher from its clips below his seat. He jumped out before the truck had fully stopped, fell, and got up and ran as best he could to the side at the rear of the fuselage. When he found the door he pulled it open and climbed inside.
Noah Gardner was already helping Molly out of her seat belt and together they brought her out and clear of the wreck. When she was safe the two men returned to the plane and walked up the tilted aisle to the cockpit.
There they found Ellen Davenport kneeling by the side of an elderly man who was slumped and motionless in the pilot’s seat. As they approached, they saw that she was straightening the old man’s disheveled clothes, smoothing a few bits of broken glass from his thin white hair, and gently easing his hands from their steadfast grip upon the wheel.
“When we stopped,” she said, “I looked over, and he was gone.”
The patter of a light freezing rain had just begun, quietly pecking at the metal skin of the aircraft. In the distance Hollis heard the unmistakable sound of sirens on the way.
“Ma’am,” he said softly, “I’m afraid we need to go.”
“I won’t leave him like this.”
“Ellen—”
“You two go on,” she said. “I’ve got my phone. I’ll wait until you’re long gone, and if they haven’t found us yet, I’ll call it in.”
Noah had known this woman long enough to recognize a final decision when he saw one, and he didn’t argue.
“Thanks for everything you’ve done for us,” he said.
Before he could stand to leave she stopped him with a touch.
“This man got us here so you could make a difference,” Ellen said. “Don’t you dare let him down.”
• • •
Once all were safely assembled in the truck and they were back under way Hollis checked the time-to-destination on the GPS. When ten minutes remained he took out the last of their disposable cell phones, punched in a number, and listened. He waited until the phone on the other end picked up and then he pressed the button that ended the call.
Sixty seconds later his phone rang twice and then went silent again. That was the signal that all would be ready up ahead.
Cathy Merrick looked over briefly from the driver’s seat, and he nodded to her.
“That’s it,” Hollis said. “From here on out it’s do or die.”
Chapter 62
Their insider at Garrison Archives was a young mailroom intern who’d been planted in her job months before.
Like most spies, much of her role up to then had involved simply blending in and waiting. Recently, however, she’d been given three important duties to perform for Molly Ross and the Founders’ Keepers.
First, she’d smuggled out a copy of the internal network architecture documents—it was amazing what low-level employees have access to when they’re put in charge of the shredder and the photocopy room. Next she copied down a few key PIN numbers from a security guard’s crib sheet and ordered a duplicate access card for all the inside doors. Once these things had been gathered she’d addressed a padded envelope to Mr. Thom Hollis, care of HomeWorx, Inc., and forwarded it all to a UPS private mailbox in the nearby town of Butler.
Third, she’d intercepted a special-delivery package when it arrived by courier at Garrison—said package having been constructed and sent by some tech-savvy co-conspirators—and after business hours that same night she’d punched a pattern of holes through the outer cardboard of the box and placed it as directed, high on a shelf in a utility room near an open vent for the air-conditioning and environment control system.
And last, at some unspecified time in the very near future, she would be ready to put on a small performance for her coworkers.
Here’s what she was supposed to do: once she’d gotten the go-ahead signal, and when her nose detected a very specific fragrance wafting through her workplace, she was to mention the smell to her colleagues, fake some vertigo and troubled breathing, and then faint dead away on the spot.
The first steps were already accomplished. When an announcement came over the PA system that a threat had been received of a possible chemical or biological weapons attack against the facility—and that this was not a drill—she knew that her final task would be required within minutes.
• • •
Anyone who’s gotten a whiff of actual cyanide gas and lived to tell the tale would confirm that its odor of bitter almonds is quite different from the familiar nutty scent of the supermarket variety. The real thing would certainly bear little resemblance to the cloying, sweet almond scent that would soon begin to show itself in the cool filtered air throughout the Garrison underground facility.
Rooms away from where Molly’s planted intern waited, the package she’d received and prepared came to life as a cell phone inside it received a call.
The ringer electronics of the phone activated a microcontroller-enabled circuit board and the salvaged heating element from a head-shop vaporizer warmed up to a bright orange glow. Servo motors whirred, pistons worked, gears and rollers turned, and at a rate of a drop per second, two ounces of Italian amaretto began to drip with a hiss onto the hot metal.
Moments later, pungent white smoke began to waft through the holes in the box, soon permeating the utility room before being sucked into the recirculating air of the HVAC system.
• • •
The minute the WMD threat had been announced all seventeen hundred employees stopped working and awaited further instructions at their posts and desks. Despite the nationwide alert that was currently in force, no immediate evacuation had been ordered. Garrison was a high-profile and somewhat controversial facility among some elements of society, and such threats were not that uncommon.
Often, after a few minutes of break time the all-clear would be sounded and everything would quickly return to normal. They were protected by many levels of security, after all, and safely ensconced more than two hundred feet beneath ground level in a rock mine hidden under a mountain.
The main Information Services room seated nearly two hundred workers, all arranged in an open grid of rows and columns of identical desks and computer workstations. The space was one of the original dug-out areas of the mine, and while the room was large it also felt somewhat claustrophobic due to a low suspended ceiling overhead.
As the employees waited out the alert period with solitaire games and chitchat, the only person still working seemed to be the mailroom girl. She rolled her cart up one row and down the next, dropping off letters and memos and making light conversation with those who bothered to acknowledge her.
Near the center of the room, the girl suddenly stopped, looking troubled. She coughed a bit, put a hand to her chest, and leaned on her cart as though she might swoon.
“Does anybody smell that?” she called out, and suddenly the room got very quiet.
Some of those near her rose at their desks and acknowledged that yes, there was an unusual odor.
“It smells like—” Her knees seemed to weaken and her voice was strained as she tried to speak again. “It smells like . . .” And with a last guttural gasp she grabbed her throat and crumpled to the floor.
As some came to her aid the clear signs of physical distress began to spread rapidly to others. Another collapsed, and then another, and many covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs or shirtsleeves and hurried for the exit to escape the now visible, seeping gas. As fear took hold and threatened to spark a stampede toward the safety of the outdoors, someone with their wits still about them ran to the wall, broke a pane of protective glass, and pulled the big red lever that sounded the general alarm.
• • •
Even before the last of the many hundreds of employees, managers, technicians, and guards had evacuated, those near the back of the crowd saw the leading vehicle of the first-responders speeding up the private road toward the facility.
A series of security barriers that were set up earlier had been pulled aside
as soon as the state of emergency within the complex had been announced. All the gates were still manned but they were now standing open so as not to impede the arrival of the rescue workers.
As the first hazmat truck arrived it slowed briefly at the farthest checkpoint and then was waved on through. The lights and sirens of many others were approaching in the distance; police, EMS, and fire departments from all over the surrounding region had been automatically summoned by the internal alarm.
The evacuated crowd parted to the sides of the road to clear the way and the first truck rumbled past them and through the fortified entrance of Garrison Archives.
Once the vehicle had disappeared inside, the remaining stragglers were quickly escorted out to safety and then, oddly enough, the massive double doors of the entrance swung closed.
Chapter 63
Noah stood off to the side as their now-empty truck was backed up and parked with its bumper jammed hard against the closed, inward-opening doors. It wasn’t until he heard that solid crunch of metal on metal that he allowed himself to accept it:
They were in.
With the fearless exuberance of youth, Lana Somin had already set to work in the abandoned guards’ booth by the front gate. A cloned keycard and PIN number of the night-shift supervisor were among the items they’d been passed by their insider. Using these, within a minute she’d reset all other access codes to random numbers and done what she could to lock out further changes.
Such measures obviously wouldn’t hold forever. The entrance to this place was built like a giant bank vault and was probably strong enough to withstand the assault of a small tactical nuke. All that strength wasn’t much comfort, though. Somewhere in an engineer’s notebook there was a contingency plan for this very scenario and that engineer’s phone would be ringing very soon. Once the people outside fully realized they’d been scammed they would bring whatever it took to force their way back in.
There was no time to waste and the clock was already running.
A number of low-slung electric people-movers were parked near the entrance. All six members of the group piled into one and set off down the main two-lane corridor with Cathy Merrick at the wheel. Despite the ordeal of their journey, all were in good shape, with the exception of Hollis. He was clearly weakening, his neglected fever was spiking, and those were only symptoms of something underneath that was probably growing worse by the minute.
The look of the place was an odd visual hybrid, part cave and part corporate. Twelve feet above the smooth pavement of the indoor road there were heavy cables, conduit, air and water ducts, and periodic amber lighting running along the rocky ceiling. The offices and workrooms they passed were like those you might find in any upscale high-rise, but the pitted walls of the tunnels leading between them appeared to have been carved out with tools no more subtle than dynamite and jackhammers.
After a half mile of dim, descending straightaways they began to realize that their hand-drawn map was far from perfect. Its errors and omissions led to some maddening backtracking and wrong turns. Valid routes looked the same as dark unfinished passages dwindling off toward dead ends. There was a great deal of new construction and very little signage to guide them. Apparently, if anyone got this far into the place without an escort it was assumed that they should know exactly where they were going.
Just as it seemed they were hopelessly lost, they rounded a bend and happened onto the very room they were looking for. It was a huge space filled end to end with identical desks and computer stations. The label INFORMATION SERVICES: CLOUD 79 was displayed above the entrance.
As they pulled over and parked they were met by a young woman with a Garrison ID pinned to her shirt. She introduced herself as Claire; she was the mailroom intern who’d helped them get this far. Once the rush for the exit had begun she’d slipped away in the confusion and hidden herself until the rest of the employees were gone. Now that they had a knowledgeable guide with a key to nearly every door, the real work could begin.
Molly’s aim seemed simple enough: to find the most frightening truths buried here in these vast archives of above-top-secret data, and then to release it all into the sunlight. It was her feeling that if the people finally saw the authentic documentation, if they could follow the actual tracks of the conspirators who were bent on destroying her country, then the good citizens of the United States of America would wake up all at once and be moved to act to save their nation.
It was a noble idea but Noah’s doubts were still lingering. Many, many damning truths had already been told in the past and most were soon forgotten. Often in those cases it was only the whistle-blowers themselves who’d been punished for the crime of speaking out.
Still, it was Molly’s hope that this time would be different. If the facts could be brought out in this definitive way—with all the evidence, all the connections, all the answers to that key question, who benefits?—then the resulting shock to the system might finally be too powerful to ignore.
The seven of them split up onto three tasks. Molly and Noah would prioritize a list of evidence they wished to find hidden within these nearly limitless memory banks. Lana Somin would worm her way into the front end of the master database with Tyler Merrick standing by to assist as he could. Lastly, Hollis, Cathy Merrick, and the new girl, Claire, would take a set of site blueprints and try to find an alternate way out of the place for when the time came to cut and run.
Faced with such little time, but free access to all the answers she’d ever wanted, Molly seemed to struggle at first to narrow her scope to the most important things. Just as a starting point the two of them came up with a list of keywords to be searched once Lana had gained access to the computer system. These topics came to them in no particular order of validity or priority as Noah wrote them down:
Frederic Whitehurst, Sibel Edmonds, and the FBI
Gary Webb and Nicaragua
Kathryn Bolkovac and DynCorp
Katharine Gun, Karen Kwiatkowski, and Iraq
Julia Davis and DHS: Google, Facebook, NSA, CIA
Trapwire, Abraxas, Stingray, RIOT, and TIA
Trailblazer, NSA, Stellar Wind, Wiebe, Roark, Binney, and Loomis
AT&T, Mark Klein, and Room 641A
LIBOR, rate-fixing, derivatives, the Tower of Basel, BIS, and worldwide central banks
Anything to do with the shadowy foundations, conglomerates, investments, and under-the-table political funding linked to a man named Aaron Doyle
Molly stopped and asked him to read back this partial list. As Noah did so he saw in her face that she was feeling exactly as he did.
They’d just scratched the surface and it was way too much already. And at the same time, it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
The truth behind nearly all these individual revelations—the secret partnerships, the hidden influence, the lies and corruptions and scandals, the high crimes against the American people perpetrated by their supposed leaders—it was already out there on the open Internet for anyone to uncover for themselves.
The problem wasn’t a lack of evidence but a basic human bias: we see only what we’re prepared to believe. After all, Molly and her mother and Danny Bailey had each spoken out on most of these things in the past, and where had it gotten them? Nowhere, except that two of them were dead and the other was about to play her last remaining card.
“It’s no good,” Molly said, and the expression on her face was desolate. “It’s not going to work.”
“We’re here,” he replied. “There’s no use giving up now. Come on, let’s do what we came to do.”
Tyler Merrick walked up then and said, “Lana’s ready for you now.”
The three of them hurried over to where the young woman was immersed in the database system. Several employees had left themselves logged in when they’d fled their desks and that had saved her some work cracking passwords.
As requested, she and Tyler had also set up for the video portion of the project.
A large
TV monitor was mounted above the desk where Lana sat. Other monitors like this were all over the place. Its screen displayed insets of live feeds from several security cameras around the facility, including views from the front entrance and various rooms and key intersections. In the center there was a larger rectangular picture that currently showed an empty chair next to the desk.
“Molly should sit there,” Lana said.
Noah helped Molly to the seat as Tyler adjusted the Webcam to center her image. He repositioned some floor lamps to perfect the lighting until the picture looked as good as it ever would, given the circumstances.
“Where’s this video going?” Noah asked.
“No place yet. We’re all set to feed it to her website and to some other video hosts when she says go. I’ve got a backup stream running through a modem that’s older than I am and a dial-up connection on one of their secure phone lines. Even if they cut the Internet fiber optics, they probably won’t think to also cut those phones. The quality may be pretty bad but it should stay live. When I flip the switch this feed will take over all the security monitors in the place, so everybody here will see the broadcast, too.”
“And you’re into the data system already?”
“I am. You should know, that layout I got is just a part of what’s here. The old part.”
“But all the dirt we’re looking for, it’s still in there?”
“Oh yeah, it’s in here.” She leaned and glanced at Molly’s list, chose the LIBOR rate-fixing heist, and keyed in some entries. Her screen filled with lists of private correspondence, phone records and transcripts, names and places and minutes from illegal meetings that had planned the recent theft of tens of trillions—enough hard evidence to convict a hundred insanely powerful people if it should ever be exposed.
Throughout all this Noah stayed at Molly’s ear, describing everything he saw. “What you’ve got on the screen there,” he said to Lana, “what can you do with that?”
“This little piece? I can print it, I can save it locally, I can zip it up and send it to a place on the Net where we can pick it up later and do whatever we want with it. If you really want to spread it around I can make a torrent and put it up on the Pirate Bay. But if we’re going to do anything online we need to do it soon.”