Wriggle was breathing hard and struggling to stay composed. He looked up at her as if only half understanding. “What?”
“Our guys hauling Pangia’s A330 behind us, sir. We told them to proceed to Tulsa.”
“Ah… no. Have Don get hold of them. Have them land in the Springs and just wait for instructions.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Quick. Go ask Don to confirm whether we have enough fuel to make Washington, DC. I think we do, but…”
“Will do,” she said. Sharon disappeared forward into the cockpit returning less than a minute later.
“Don says it would be tight but we can make it. Two hours and twenty minutes from now. We have a kick-ass tail wind.”
“Where is that Pangia flight? How much fuel and time do they have left?”
“I… have no idea, sir. We can probably calculate it. They were a Tel Aviv to New York flight with normal reserves, if we knew the departure time…”
“No. There’s no time. We’ll land at the Springs and work this from our secure lines.”
She started to turn for the cockpit again, but he stopped her.
“Wait… Sharon, do we still have classified capability on this satellite phone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, tell Don to head direct to Andrews. I’ll work on things from here. I need our staff assembled at the Springs and waiting for instructions.”
“What are we going to do, sir?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know! I’m thinking. We had no contingency plans for anything like this. That airplane was never supposed to be out of our control, dammit! And nothing like this is even supposed to be possible.”
Silence filled the space between them for a very uncomfortable few seconds before Sharon Wallace filled it.
“We have to help them, sir,” she said.
The general’s eyes locked on to hers with a pleading look she knew he could never articulate.
“Sharon, goddammit, don’t you think I know that?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
NSA, Ft. Meade, Maryland (7:10 p.m. EST / 0010 Zulu)
“Jenny? What happened? Where’d he go?” Seth Zeiglar was leaning in the door of the small conference room, which now held nothing but her.
She looked up from what was apparently deep thought and shook her head as she shrugged her shoulders.
“Frankly, I’m not sure. Ten minutes ago we were fixing to go back over everything we knew… or thought we knew… about the signals, and Will Bronson gets a text, immediately makes some lame excuse, and he’s on his feet thanking me for nothing and then evaporating.”
Seth came in, closed the door behind him, and sat down, looking concerned. “So, what did you find together?”
Jenny sighed and tossed the papers she’d been holding on the table. “We validated my theory that the signal sequence is an echo that has been apparently piggybacking on several dozen communication satellites around the globe. That, in itself, is a pretty good trick, requiring some very creative programming, and I told him that, in my opinion, this isn’t something you can set up in a matter of days. Chances are, the transponders involved have been quietly prepped for many months… maybe years.”
“Prepped in what way?”
“Quietly reprogrammed from the ground to carry this mystery signal on their normal datastreams from an existing transponder whenever it receives a carefully coded order. But Seth, what I haven’t discovered is, where is the mother burst coming from? I was working to pinpoint it when the signals stopped. I’ll have to go into the historic data now.”
“Geographically, you mean?”
“Yeah. Where’s the uplink coming from? That might give us a clue as to who’s behind it. “
“Wait, Jenny, you said the signals stopped?”
“Yes!” she scooted her chair toward him in excitement, an index finger in the air. “There was what appeared to be an answering burst, then an acknowledgement, then nothing. We ran a series of signal comparisons and found that the programming message changed after the answering burst.”
“Something responded?”
“Yes, just about three hours ago. Some station somewhere accepted the programming order, or at least that’s what we assume happened. So, just like I said before, the question eating at me is: What entity or machine has been told to do or not to do something? See, if this wasn’t nefarious, why the hell would someone go to this extreme to keep the process coded and secret?”
“Was there any sudden breakthrough idea you came up with or some suggestion made that might have triggered our DIA man’s departure?”
“No. Just the message he received. I didn’t get to read it. And suddenly he’s evacuating. At least it felt like an evacuation.”
Seth Zieglar shook his head. “Well… my guess is something much more dramatic just came up. And I’ll bet… if we did a little digging on the current classified alert channels…”
She was already brightening. “Yeah! Got it. I’ll dive in.”
“Tomorrow, Jen. Tomorrow you dive in. You should go home now. You do have one of those, right?”
“One of what?” she said, puzzled.
“A home. I seem to recall a long suffering cat in your life.”
“Oh, that would be Duke. But he’s okay alone. He only dies of malnutrition if I’m gone more than a week.”
“Lucky cat.”
“Lemme work late on this, Seth.”
“You can if you want, but… is this going to help us?”
“Don’t know. Can’t tell. Want to keep digging.”
“It gets spooky around here late at night.”
“I know, but I’m not alone.”
Seth pulled himself to his feet and waved. “Okay. Have a great evening! I’ll be home if you uncover the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
“What? I don’t think I understand.”
“Just… a joke. Don’t stay so late tonight that you don’t make it in tomorrow on time, okay?”
“Got it,” she said.
Ten minutes later, a fresh coffee in hand, Jenny settled back into her work station and keyed up one of the secure intelligence channels just as the phone rang with Seth on the other end, his voice, she thought, a touch too cheerful.
“Okay, Jenny, mystery solved. Our Mr. Bronson just called my cell phone and essentially said it turns out to be a classified DOD thing, and don’t worry, he’ll explain later, and thanks so much for the help. He said he was greatly impressed by you.”
“You’re on your cell phone, right?” she asked, well aware that somewhere in their own NSA building their words were flowing into an immense datastream recording bank and being examined for trigger words or phrases. The public might have been exempted now from phone monitoring but definitely not NSA personnel.
“That would be a correct assumption. In any event, unless you just want to stay and play video games, go home. Nothing to see here.”
“You’re sure?” she probed, evaluating the nuances of his reply and the time he took to speak it.
“We… have no reason… of which I am currently aware… to not take our compatriots at their word. So… unless it’s making up for what you didn’t get done today on normal tasks, go home.”
“Uh, huh. Okay. G’night Seth.”
“Likewise.”
She disconnected the line and stared at the phone’s screen for the better part of a minute. What the hell was that? She’d worked for Seth long enough to know his vocal patterns, and that was a very stressed version of her boss. Stressed and unnatural.
Jenny shivered involuntarily, wondering what kind of interdepartmental intrigue would cause a chain reaction like she was apparently witnessing: DIA doing strange things and perhaps causing Seth to make calls to her with information she inherently couldn’t trust.