“Soon,” Dewey whispered. “You think Nancy will blame me if it doesn’t work?”
She wanted to slap him. “If it doesn’t work? What if it kills him?”
“I never thought about that. That would make Nancy pretty mad, wouldn’t it?”
She wanted to scream. “If that happens, we’d have to get you out of here. There’s no telling what she might do.”
“That’s not very comforting,” he said.
“You ought to be terrified, Dewey. You always do things like this. You always get yourself in trouble.”
He hugged himself tighter and they sat in silence while her mind raced. If the device worked, the Old Man would be grateful, but if it failed, his memory would continue to slip. She knew about Eric’s mother and her sudden onset Alzheimer’s. If the same happened to the Old Man, it would be a disaster. He was the foundation of the OTM.
Maybe if she told Nancy, the procedure could be put on hold. “Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said. “You’re going to tell Nancy everything. Eric, too. You’ve got to get ahead of this.”
“That sounds like it might get me in more trouble.”
“You’ll be in a hell of a lot more trouble if he dies,” she snapped.
“Oh. Okay. Thanks, Karen. You’re a good friend.”
“I’m your only friend, Dewey.”
“You are my only friend,” he conceded. “That’s why I can tell you about this other thing.”
“Other thing?”
He pointed at the wall of monitors. “I got bored so I checked your work.”
“You checked my work? I told you to stop hacking into my workstation.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to help.”
“You are simply unbelievable. You’ve got to quit doing things like this. Aren’t you in enough trouble?”
He nodded rapidly. “I’m sorry, Karen. I know you told me not to, but I just couldn’t help myself. I found something.”
Her anger started to fade. As oblivious as Dewey could be about personal space and privacy, he was also a genius. “What did you find?”
“You know the Chinese hackers? Unit 61398?”
She knew. The whole OTM knew. The People’s Liberation Army had recruited an entire city of young hackers who spent the last two years engaged in a shadowy game of cyber-warfare aimed at US companies. It no longer made sense for China to develop their own computers or weapons platforms, not when they could steal the data from companies in the US.
Everything from banking portals to medical devices to stealth technology were suddenly open season for the PLA’s hacking division. Lockheed-Martin had suffered a massive invasion that allowed the hackers to gather schematics and research for a number of classified drone programs, as well as the algorithms behind a number of stealth technologies.
The stolen data was provided to Chinese companies, giving them a competitive edge. It went beyond espionage. China was engaged in world-wide economic warfare.
She knew all this because they had an inside man in Unit 61398. “What have you found?”
He pointed to the monitor. “One of the other projects the Old Man had me working on. The network taps at all ISP’s in the United States have been capturing and forwarding a copy of every packet bound for Unit 61398.”
She gasped. “Why didn’t I know about this? I’ve been running point on the Unit 61398 case.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. The Old Man likes to be thorough? Two sets of eyes, maybe?”
“How did you manage this?”
“I used the same network taps we have at the datacenters. I just redirected a copy of every packet bound for IP’s that we’ve registered to Unit 61398 to our data warehouse. No one noticed.”
“I don’t believe this. Any other bombshells you’d like to drop on me?”
“Uh, no? Well, just the last thing. I searched the exfiltrated data from the US companies for bio-terror and bombs and found something… interesting. How much do you know about Red Team?”
Eric shook his head. “Red Team? I’ve taken part in one.” He knew that Red Teams were groups created to challenge an organization’s effectiveness. Delta routinely took part in Red Teams, but in 2004 he helped set up the Army’s Directed Studies Office. They routinely ran thought exercises about military strategy and possible threats to American military power, usually focusing on emerging threats. “What does Red Team have to do with anything?”
Nancy sat next to him in the conference room. Deion was to his left, and Karen sat at the head of the table, gulping down the remains of her coffee before answering. “The CIA has been running Red Teams for years, but after 9/11 they really stepped it up. They brought together scientists, science-fiction authors, and business people and put them in a compound in Colorado and told them to go nuts.”
“I’d heard about that,” Nancy said. “The results were… intriguing.”
“I heard about that from Val,” Deion joined in. “The eggheads came up with some wild shit.”
“That’s one way to describe it,” Karen said. “Dewey ran searches against the copies of the stolen data that Unit 61398 pilfered from US companies. Have you heard of the EOS Corp?”
He had. EOS was a giant conglomerate that had its fingers in a million different high-tech and bio-medical research pies. “Dean Palmer, right?”
“I heard about him,” Deion said. “Real brainiac, right? Lives like he’s broke. Puts all his money into R&D?”
“That’s him,” Karen said. “He took part in the CIA’s Red Team from 2003 until 2006. The Red Team’s mandate was to plan for a multi-pronged attack. Apparently Mr. Palmer kept thinking about it, and after the exercise was over he wrote a detailed plan for detonating a nuclear weapon in New York City while also striking the United States with a genetically engineered virus.”
Eric sat up so suddenly his chair squeaked. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“EOS was one of the corps that got hacked by Unit 61398,” Nancy said grimly.
“Shit,” Deion said, slapping his hands against the table. “Palmer practically gave it to them.”
“Dewey was collecting a database of Unit 61398’s stolen information. When he ran a search for bio-terror and nuclear weapons, he found Palmer’s report.”
Eric’s mind raced, but something bothered him. “How did Dewey gather this data?”
Karen swallowed hard. “The Old Man tasked Dewey with side jobs over the past several years.”
“Side jobs?” Nancy asked, her eyes growing cold. “What side jobs?”
“Jobs like examining the Chinese hacking threat and evaluating the stolen data,” Karen said. “Palmer developed a plan using bio-terror and a nuke. It’s safe to assume the PLA has it.”
Eric nodded. “Is there any chance that Palmer is compromised?”
“Unlikely,” Karen said. “He’s the most upright person you’d ever meet. He donates most of his money to charities, and he’s competing with Bill Gates to give away his fortune before he dies.”
Nancy cleared her throat. “We need to put an electronic leash on Palmer, just to be sure.”
“Already done,” Karen said. “What about the Chinese?”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Eric said. “It’s not like them. Stealing secrets is one thing, but implementing a plan to nuke America?” He shook his head. “Why attack now?”
Deion grunted. “They’re pissed about Taiwan. Maybe that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back?”