So here he was, 45 years of age, turning gray, counting bricks of Semtex like they were loaves of bread in an American supermarket, in this stinking, ungodly heat. Some promotion. He was well on the way to “Greeter” status at the local Wal-Mart. He popped a couple of Vicodin and continued the seemingly endless count. Since getting kicked out of the Navy, nothing had gone the way he’d planned, and his problems seemed to be growing. If his life was a river, he thought, it had definitely changed from a bright sparkling mountain stream to a mass of sludge and mud blockaded by a dam.
The one agency missing on the Semtex scene was the relatively new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. TTIC (pronounced “tea tick”) had been established on May 1, 2003, partially in response to devastating terrorist attacks on American soil. The concept behind the new agency was simple enough. Analysts from every agency in the US Intelligence Community received a steady stream of information to be developed by their agents and sources. Intelligence officers from every department continuously fit those pieces into the ongoing and ever-changing factual mosaic. Information was probed, developed, questioned, validated, and analyzed. Further information might come to the surface at any time and require immediate attention. The stream of “Intel” was continually sent “up the chain” from these Intelligence Agencies, and now also went laterally to TTIC. That agency received reports from the National Security Agency, the CIA, FBI, BATF, Secret Service, and all military Intelligence Agencies. It also received reports from security agencies from other countries; MI-5 and MI-6 reports were received daily from the United Kingdom, and Israel’s Mossad and Canada’s security organization, CSIS, reported daily. All told, 27 countries sent information on a regular basis. The people working with TTIC had distinguished themselves in their own Intelligence Agencies prior to their TTIC assignment. Generally, they were also individuals with highly developed computer skills. All in all, it was a brainy crowd, with an incredible amount of information at their fingertips.
The true power of TTIC was in its ability to access hundreds of thousands of databases in countries all over the world. Cellular phone, driving, and criminal records, and records from all the large retail chains, were at their beck and call; dozens of new databases were added to their vast addressing system each day. TTIC had access to trillions of bits of information — pieces that it could splice, dice, and parse in many ways, and at very high speeds. If someone bought a prescription, TTIC could find it. If they applied for a fishing license, TTIC would hunt it down. With debit and credit cards, commerce was becoming “cashless,” and slowly turning toward being completely “digital.” TTIC was designed to take advantage of this digital age.
The agency was powered by an experimental IBM computer known as Blue Gene/L. The computer was originally built for the Livermore National Laboratory in California, installed in 2004 with much fanfare. It contained 16 towers, each approximately six feet in height, and came with an elaborate Freon cooling system. The system had stolen the supercomputer crown from Japan, which had built the exotic Earth-Simulator supercomputer a few years earlier. Blue Gene/L had staggering amounts of ram, and could perform more than 300 trillion calculations per second, far outweighing anything else that had ever been built.
What was not made public was that IBM had actually manufactured several such systems — one for Livermore Labs, and a second for TTIC, in Washington, DC. The TTIC model had roughly twenty-five percent 25 % more processing power than the Livermore model, and several times more disc space. Sixteen systems were also given to the National Security Agency. The existence of these systems was kept secret, even from most of the Intelligence Community. They were networked in a 16-system cluster, and together they performed at more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second. The NSA had operated the fastest computers on the planet since the beginning of the computing era, although few outside the walls of Crypto City, their home base, knew that. They saw this new system as nothing more than their God-given right.
At TTIC, the processing modules, power supplies, and disc drives took up an entire floor of their own, below the floor that housed the control room. Unlike the supercomputers of the past, which required armies of staff to keep the hardware operational, Blue Gene required only 20 people; essentially four shifts of five employees, working to ensure that the infrastructure remained intact. Given the computer’s sophistication and self-reliance, it was a fairly simple job. Their main responsibilities were virus patrol and making pots of coffee.
The second floor of the building contained some administrative offices, boardrooms, and secretarial stations. The main floor had reception, storage rooms, and little else. Not seen, but omnipresent, were many armed security personnel. The front of the building was marked by a small sign that said “Donovan and Sons Information Processing Corporation.” It was an inside joke.
The building had a large number of dedicated and highly secure fiber-optic telephone and data connections. Should some enterprising soul have found a way to compromise those links, they would have run into an extremely high level of encryption — the cutting edge of what hundreds of mathematicians working at the NSA had developed. The lines were linked to the CIA offices, the Pentagon, the White House, and the 15 other agencies that made up the American Intelligence Community.
The most important floor in the building was the fourth floor, which housed the huge TTIC control room — this was where the eyes, ears, and hands of the organism lived. The room was built on a circular plan. The curved front wall contained nine large flat panel displays, specially built by IBM, each with a diagonal measurement of approximately 101 inches. Currently, one was tuned in to CNN, another to BBC, and a third to Al Jazeera. There were three satellite images — two from KH-11’s focused on Iraq, and the third a feed from one of three spectacular new ORION satellites, currently focused on a North Korean factory site. Two more screens displayed video feeds from Predator Drones, and the ninth displayed Google’s homepage. Twenty 48-inch screens were vertically stacked on the extreme left and right sides of the wall.
The rest of the room consisted of two raised circular terraces with built-in desks, each with inlaid computers and display panels. Some of the stations had five or six additional independent display screens of various configurations and sizes. In all, there were 40 such stations. The center of the room contained a large, recessed, illuminated world map, some 35 feet across. The map was in fact a specially manufactured, interactive LCD display; if any portion of the map were activated, detailed information appeared in a separate window, which could in turn be enlarged for even greater detail. Using technology similar to the LCD mapping programs found in high-end cars, information could be drilled down to street level. Data about who lived, worked, or had significant connections in the area could also be brought up, or displayed on any of the larger monitors on the front wall. The staff had started to call it the “Atlas Screen.”
Hamilton Turbee was one of those fortunate enough to be working with these elite systems at TTIC. He had been personally invited by the Senate subcommittee in charge of TTIC to join. “Turbee” didn’t need the money. He didn’t need the job. He was by nature resistive of authority, and didn’t fit into an orderly bureaucracy. He was also affected with a social disorder, though he had medication to control it. He had known from the start that the atmosphere wouldn’t be easy for him. But the thought of playing with the most powerful computer on the planet was too seductive for him to pass up. When invited, he agreed to become one of the first employees of the new agency. He was distressed when he discovered, several months later, that the NSA actually had more computing horsepower than TTIC.