For this case, she and Jensen had been developing sophisticated link analysis tools for both structured and unstructured data, which could help establish larger patterns of communications. These rarefied data analysis techniques might also let them track individual devices, making it possible in some cases to determine the identities of users who were doing all they could to hide who they were.
She started by putting the new tools to work mapping out the geographical areas with the most data flows related to the Ahearn murders. More of a simple test of their model because that task was relatively easy and highly predictable. The greatest concentration centered on Massachusetts, Boston in particular, and for obvious reasons: outside of intelligence circles, no one had reason to connect Professor Ahearn and his wife to the threats against the WAIS.
Next, she applied their link analysis across all of North America. Beyond a two-hundred-mile radius of the crime scene, the interest in the Ahearn murders diminished notably. Where it did exist, it was confined mostly to academic institutions. The California Institute of Technology, for example, had a fair amount of metadata that appeared related to Ahearn. So did other institutions of that nature.
That also proved true of scientific journals based in major urban areas.
Comfortable that the link analysis was passing its initial challenges, Lana extended it across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Not surprisingly, China and Japan led the way, but Beijing’s metadata flows far outstripped Tokyo’s. In fact, Lana would have characterized China as having a consuming interest. It made her wonder what the Chinese, archrivals of Russia, knew or suspected. And it killed her to think the Chinese might already know more than the U.S. did.
Tokyo’s lesser level of interest prevailed throughout Europe where metadata rose and fell largely along academic lines, with departments of physics, computer science, and, to a slightly lesser degree, math, displaying the most activity.
She saved Russia and its former republics for last. The latter yielded little, with the exception of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, a hotbed of pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists. She would keep it in mind as she moved on to her major interest, Moscow.
Russia’s capital was a veritable beehive with metadata levels linked to the Ahearn murders topping Beijing’s. More notable to Lana was the recent intense interest, as in the last twelve hours.
She forced herself to remain steady, though, because dry wells with metadata were as common as the grimier efforts in the world’s oil fields. But you still have to drill, she told herself.
Especially with billions of lives potentially on the line.
She began with Russia’s energy sector, finding metadata way beyond the norm between Moscow and almost all of Russia’s nuclear generating stations. Which made no immediate sense with most of the plants in no danger of flooding from an attack on WAIS. But it would make sense if a comment from Clarence Besserman after last night’s meeting were about to bear fruit.
With his shirt fully untucked by that point, and even his bow tie drooping, Besserman had said that if he were looking for connections between the Ahearn murders and the threats to the WAIS — the issue Lana had brought up only minutes before — he would keep in mind that proponents of AAC advocated building those facilities near plants producing renewable energy. The reason was simple: until the AAC process was refined further, it would use a lot of energy to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“See, there’s no point,” he’d added, “in pursuing AAC with dirty fuel. You’d end up pumping as much, if not more, CO2 into the atmosphere than you’d take out.”
Fingers flying, Lana now checked Russian hydropower, centered in Siberia and the eastern end of the country. Quantitative analysis of that metadata demonstrated even stronger linkage between Russia’s foremost renewable energy sector and the Ahearn murders. Lana didn’t need to make a similar check of wind and solar production in Russia because, for all intents and purposes, they didn’t exist, providing less than 1 percent of the nation’s energy needs. But hydro? A fat 16 percent.
Normally, she would have started diving into the metadata, unveiling the full content, but these were not normal times. She’d found connections, but not enough, not yet.
Pressing on, her link analysis also showed massive metadata flows from the country’s largest hydroelectric plants and the Russian secret police, FSB, in Lubyanka Square, which had its own distinct flows to and from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
By comparison, she found only marginal levels of activity from, or directed to, the country’s scores of fossil-fuel-fired plants. The significant metadata load emanated from those non-CO2-producing facilities, which made sense, given the reality of AAC energy consumption.
Pushing herself even further, she worked the link analysis once again and watched a tangle of metadata take a neat and familiar shape right before her eyes.
Would you look at that? A nearly perfect equilateral triangle showed scores of unmistakable links between Russia’s renewable energy sector, its secret police, and the Ahearn murders.
With the ice sheet added, the triangle morphed — even as she watched — into the four points of a square.
Focusing even more closely on Moscow, she saw a fierce flurry of activity based, of all places, in an apartment building in the city’s downtown.
What the hell is going on in there?
She forced aside any considerations of that for now because what struck her most pointedly in the last few seconds was that the FSB was positively data-drunk with the WAIS.
Excavating deeper, she found no previous history of such metadata flows between those four points of interest.
Nice work, Jeff. She would call Jensen later to let him know their efforts appeared to be panning out.
But that would be the beginning and end of the good news. The metadata square made it appear that Russians were coordinating an effort that would have them bomb the WAIS, raise sea levels, take control of Arctic gas and oil reserves, and control the world’s thermostat with AAC, which would be fueled by their ample reserves of hydro- and nuclear power.
Those reserves would be worth countless trillions of dollars once the means of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere was in place. And with so many other oil-producing nations reeling from the shock of a sudden rise in sea levels, most of the planet would be forced, by necessity, to become Russia’s customers simply to survive.
But what galled Lana almost as much as that scheme was the ongoing attempt by the perpetrators to create plausible deniability. Maybe that was the reason for all metadata arising from a Moscow apartment building.
She checked her watch. Three hours had flown by. But three very productive hours. She wanted to look into what the devil was going on with that apartment building but drilling deeper there would have to wait. Her head felt like it was about to explode. She needed to get away from her computer. Not only to clear her thoughts but to see her daughter. But not without a quick text to Jensen letting him know their work had paid off, and another one to Holmes saying they needed to talk as soon as he was vertical.
It was still early enough to beat rush-hour traffic, the millions who would be rising and driving, oblivious to the demons that were about to haunt their lives.
She found Tanesa’s house quickly, a tidy single-story home across the Potomac. Tanesa’s mother, Esme, met Lana at the door. She welcomed her like an old friend. They’d met ever so briefly at last night’s choir performance at the National Cathedral. Lana apologized for arriving at such an early hour.