Chapter 71 – And Back

Monday morning, Alex had a great time getting Willow fed and taken care of and off to her home. It was almost like having Annie back. She hadn’t thought a lot about how much she missed Annie, what with Annie doing a big, important internship at a chemical research lab for the summer instead of coming home.

But it would be great to get to spend some time with Annie. Even if Annie was probably working sixty hours a week and having her nose buried in a chemistry textbook the rest of the time, like things were way too often when Annie was still in high school. Even if Alex was having to drop everything and fly off to who knew where to try and stop awful stuff. Even if there was stuff Alex couldn’t tell Annie about because it was a DHS secret, and there was stuff Annie couldn’t tell Alex about because it was a business secret, and there was stuff Annie wouldn’t tell Alex about because Alex wouldn’t understand the science. But she still missed Annie.

Alex showered and washed her hair extra well, because wearing a wig-cap all day was just bleah. Still, it probably beat those booth babes who had hair down to their shoulder blades, and five pounds of hair-gel holding it in a perfect superheroine coif. Ick. She’d have to shower for twenty minutes to get her hair clean, and then she’d need over half an hour the next morning to get her hair ready again. No, having gorgeous Terawatt hair was way easier when it was a wig.

She got back to her usual routine. She put her phone on speakerphone and went through her martial arts routines while she chatted with Robyn and Nicole. When she started telling them about Comic Con, she sent them pictures of her and Willow and Ray and some of the really mega-cool costumes she’d seen.

“What’s this one?”

She said, “It’s a girl crossplaying as Data in ‘First Contact’ where the Borg graft human parts on him.”

“Ooh! Now I get it!”

“Oh, my God, is this a guy as Danielle Atron? That’s hysterical!”

She agreed, “Totally. And he did it at the Terawatt get-together in front of like eighty or ninety Terawatts, so it was even funnier.” And then she had even more photos of ‘mustache Danielle’. Robyn and Nicole thought it was hilarious.

Working on her martial arts with distractions was pretty cool, and maybe the kind of practice she needed. And then she had a long talk with them about Ray and Saturday night and why Willow’s help was … not. Robyn thought it was awesome Willow was trying so hard to be there for Alex, and totally wished someone had been that helpful the night she lost her cherry. Then Nicole told them all about how she had her first time after the big party they had about the meatpacking plant victory.

Alex worked for a while on her on-line programming course, and then chatted with Ray for over half an hour while he was at work. Then she worked some more and then checked in with Louis, who was driving up to check on a couple more theme parks in L.A., and then meeting up with Marsha for another convention.

She worked some more on the course, and then Skyped Hanna. And sure enough, Hanna was still kind of confused about Comic Con and conventions and dressing up as a character. It took Alex maybe half an hour to convince her that cosplay was not some kind of covert maneuver for espionage or stuff.

Then she called Jack, who was probably the reason Hanna was all confused about cosplay. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but her experience of the group at the West Virginia base was that only Jack and Charlie were naughty enough to confuse someone like that, and Charlie would never do something like that to Hanna.

Walter transferred the phone right to Jack. “Hey, Peter! Having fun running around photographing Spiderman? And running around in Halloween costumes?”

“I didn’t take a photo of Terawatt. And cosplay isn’t Halloween,” she complained. “Did you tell Hanna that cosplay was covert ops?”

“Me?” he said in that ‘who could possibly suspect me’ tone he did. “Nah, it was Deborah. She has no idea what cosplay is, but that didn’t stop her from giving Hanna and Cindy a big explanation. It’s just that Cindy knows enough to ignore her. Me? All I know about it is my Willow is the most gorgeous Jean Grey ever. Famke Janssen? Pfaugh. By the way, how many times does Jean Grey have to die before people stop caring anymore? ‘Oh, she’s dead, that’s what, fifth time this year?’ Dead once? Major tear jerker. Dead twice? Oh, didn’t we see this before? Dead more than that? Reruns.”

Jack was really good at derailing people. She managed not to lose the thread this time. She insisted, “Well, you need to get Willow or someone else with a clue to explain stuff to Hanna, because she’s totally confused. And don’t tell her it’s like flying monkeys.”

Jack complained, “Why’s everyone so down on flying monkeys?”

She went to something else. “I sent you a tiny bit of video from Saturday.”

He started laughing. “Oh, the Danielle Atron with a mustache? Oh, crap, was that hilarious. Even Mister Iowa cracked up. I am so looking forward to showing that to Atron when we catch her next time. She’ll glow so purple she’ll go ultra-violet.”

He managed to stop snickering, and he added, “Oh, and the Teramom went crazy with the craft projects while you were gone.”

“She’s not the Teramom, okay?”

She could practically hear the huge smile on his end of the line. “Well, she cranked out two identical leotards that we picked up, along with two of the plastic makeup things the Teradad made —”

“Jack!”

But he just kept going. “And the Teramom gave Walter all the details on the wig and boots and bra and gel padding and everything else, too. So, from now on, the SRI is always going to have a uniform gym bag ready for you.”

Alex gave up. She just said, “Well, make sure you’ve got two boxes of energy bars in there, too. Plus all the other stuff I need.”

“Oh, we got that, too. The Teramom sent us two matching sets, so we’ve got undies and jammies covered, and dopp kits, and an emergency change of regular clothes. She even sent Walter the specs on what to have loaded in the dopp kit, too. I’m hoping this’ll make things easier the next time you need to rush off on SRI business.”

She said, “Well, I’ll still need phones, and the tablet, and maybe my camera gear, and all that.”

He said, “We should definitely have copies of all your camera gear, too. Send me an email with the details on the camera bodies and the lenses and the filters and the memory cards and anything else you need. And maybe Acid Burn can supply us with a duplicate phone and tablet that she can backload, or synch up with your base systems. We’ll get back to you on that, so assume you need to bring the camera gear and the connectivity gear until I say so.”

Not for the first time, it occurred to her that Jack knew way more about computers than he let on.

Jack said, “Oh, wait, I need to peek at this email … Yes! My girl rocks! Acid Burn cracked that drive before the whole NSA!”

Alex gasped, “Wow, that’s awesome! Because she told me they have like hundreds of times her CPU cycles, so they could crack it way faster.”

Jack stopped sounding excited. “And if it took her a couple weeks, they should have had it done … in a couple hours …” He proceeded to say a whole string of words she was pretty sure he didn’t say in front of Charlie. “T, I need you and Burn tomorrow morning. I’ll set it up with her. Be at the Camp Atron tarmac at 0600. Come as Terawatt, just in case. It’ll just be a couple hours here, and then a flight home, so don’t bother with anything except the phone and tablet.”

“Jack?”

“See you tomorrow,” he said firmly. “Over and out.”

The more she thought about that, the worse it sounded.

She did some more of the computer course, and had lunch with her mom. She just sort of dropped it in casually, “Oh, can I have a slice of the chocolate cake for dessert?”

Her mom sort of blushed, “About that … We sort of had a slice after dinner. Every night. And your dad had a few slices that went into work with him for lunch. And maybe we split a slice as a late-night snack a couple of times. I cut it into twelve pieces, but …”

Alex said, “Well, maybe Willow will have another cake when I see her tomorrow.”

“Alex! You just got home last night! You have to leave tomorrow?”

Alex told her, “It’s just for a meeting. I’ll be home tomorrow night.”

“Just a meeting?”

She nodded. “SRI stuff.”

Her mom looked miserable. “It’s not right that all this is on your shoulders. You’re only seventeen!”

“I’m almost eighteen.”

Her mom glared at her. “That’s not the point.”

She held her mom’s hand and said, “I know. But if I don’t do this, who will? Jack doesn’t like pulling me into these things, but he’s trying to save the whole world. Oh, and he called you the Teramom.”

“What?” Her mom looked shocked, and then she broke out in giggles. “That is kind of funny.”

She complained, “Mom! This’ll never stop! If you’re the Teramom and Dad’s the Teradad, then he’ll call everything the Tera-something! The Teraphone and the Terasuit and the Terajet. He’ll call Ray the Teradate. If I get a dog, it’ll be the Terapooch! You need to put your foot down!”

Her mom gave her a sly smile and said, “I’ll check with the Teradad and see.”

“Mom!”

“Hmm, what kind of breed should we get for the Teradog?”

“MOM!”

“Maybe a fox tera-er?”

“MOM!!!”

After lunch, she drove over to KPVC to sign forms for Laura Marsters and turn over the original of the permission form. That went fine, but Laura was really grumpy. Alex finally asked what was the matter.

Laura asked, “Do you really want to know?” Alex nodded. “You’re not just being polite?” Alex shook her head no. “You’re really a nice kid. I probably shouldn’t dump this on you. But it’s Glenn Howard. The talk radio jerk? Mister ‘Truther’ himself?”

Alex said, “Oh, that guy. My mom hates him. She almost called him up the other week to tell him he’s an idiot.”

Laura groaned. “Well, he’s pestering the crap out of the station. Specifically, me, Brad, our news anchors, and the station manager. He’s claiming we’re a part of some great conspiracy to make people believe in Terawatt so the government can strip away our inalienable rights.”

Alex told her, “That guy’s a complete jerkhead. Why don’t you just sue him for … whatever?”

Laura scowled. “I wish. Defamation of character and slander, at a minimum. But the station owner said no way. We’re not giving that piece of garbage any free publicity, and the only way we could guarantee we’d win that trial would be if we could get the real Terawatt to show up, and then Howard’s attorney could ask her whatever he wanted, like what her real name is. She’d never play along on something like that. We can’t even get her to show up for an interview.”

Alex said, “I bet Terawatt really hates that guy.”

Laura growled, “Well, the next time you see her, ask her to fly out to Omaha, where he’s based, and give him a super-powered wedgie for me.”

Alex smiled. “I kind of doubt she takes suggestions from people making a living off her.”

Alex got home and at least found some good news. Her mom was standing there holding an envelope and just about hopping up and down with excitement. “Honey! Your SAT scores came!”

Well, her mom hadn’t opened the envelope, since it was addressed to Alex, but she was still totally wired about it. Alex was a little nervous. But she opened it up and read the scores.

Okay, she’d thought she did pretty well on them, but this was nuts. “Mom? Do you think they gave me someone else’s scores?”

Her mom said, “Don’t be silly. You told me how much better you did than the first time you took them.”

But her scores said 750 math, 730 verbal, and 730 written. That was a 2210 total. Annie only got a 2180, and she was a genius! Alex suddenly wondered if Jack could have gotten his IT guys to mess with her scores.

Her mom hugged her and squealed, “I knew you could do it!”

And when her dad came home and saw her scores, he hugged her and told her he knew she could do it, and took everyone out to dinner at Alex’s favorite all-you-can-eat buffet.

When she complained that there had to be a mistake because her score was higher than Annie’s her dad insisted, “Honey, Annie’s only better than you at science. And her math score was higher than yours, but an 800 is only fifty points higher than what you got. Her verbal and written scores were both lower.”

Alex pointed out, “Yeah, but she didn’t re-take it, and she didn’t get super-genius advice on studying for it.”

Her mom frowned at her and said, “That doesn’t change the fact that you took the test and you got the grade. Annie took lots of pre-tests and example tests before she did her SAT, you know. And she took the PSAT and the JSAT as preparation.”

Alex admitted, “Umm, I didn’t know that.”

Her dad reminded her, “She was nervous, and you know how Annie handles being nervous.”

Right. Alex knew exactly how Annie handled being nervous about stuff like tests. By burying herself in more work and more preparation and more studying.

So when they got home, they called Annie, who wasn’t at her apartment anyway, but was still in the lab even though it was like ten o’clock at night there. And Annie was really pleased about her score! Alex had sort of figured Annie would be kind of jealous, since braininess was the Annie thing.

Alex just said, “Thanks. I … You know, I miss you. I wish you were here this summer.”

Annie said, “Yeah, me, too. Even if it sounds like you’re as busy as I am. But right now I think I’ll have two weeks at the end of the summer to come home before school starts back up, so I can even be there for your birthday.”

“That would be so great!” Alex grinned. “And I expect really awesome presents!”

“Alex, you’re not six anymore,” her mom fussed.

Her dad said, “Annie, it would be great if you could get home for a while so we could talk about … important family things.”

“Oh?”

Her mom said, “Yes. I think that’s enough about that, however.”

Annie gushed, “Okay, that’ll be great. And I need a photo together with you. The guys at the lab really don’t believe famous photographer A.L. Mack is my little sister.”

Alex blushed for like five minutes.

*               *               *

The next morning, she showered and ate a big breakfast. Then she changed into her Terawatt uniform and grabbed her padded case for her tablet and stuff. She didn’t bother to pack her regular phone or the chargers. She put on her earjack and tucked her tPhone into its little pocket in her glove. That gave her enough room to shove a few energy bars in the outer pockets of the case. She grabbed the case and went silvery so she could fly down to the garage and out through the stormwater runoff system.

She was at the Camp Atron tarmac with fifteen minutes to spare, and the Cessna was just landing. She watched from a few hundred feet in the air as a refueling truck hurried over and started pumping jet fuel into the Cessna.

There was a familiar little electric car driving up to a parking space not too far from the Cessna. A mysterious redhead in dark glasses and a trench coat climbed out and pulled a valise out of the car, before walking up the steps into the Cessna. Alex hurried after her.

Alex flew into the Cessna in time to see Willow take off her dark glasses and say hi to Graham and Jo. Alex hugged Willow, then flew over and hugged Jo, too. She only shook Graham’s hand.

Jo asked, “Isn’t this going to be traceable? Your car’s license plate and your name and address on the Camp Atron log-in sheets?”

Willow grinned. “Not with Jack pulling strings!” She showed Jo her fake ID.

“Oh, come on, don’t tell me they fell for that,” groused Jo.

Alex took a peek and giggled. The fake ID Jack had gotten her said her name was Jean Grey and she lived in Salem Center, New York. And Alex wasn’t sure, but she thought the address Jack put down for her on Graymalkin Lane was where the X-Men’s mansion was supposed to be.

Willow bubbled, “And Jack had a set of fake license plates for me, too! They’re magnetic so they stick to my real ones, and they’re New York plates.”

Alex said, “Maybe you should show Jo some of the photos of you at Comic Con.”

Willow grinned excitedly. “I had no idea so many people took pictures of me!” She pulled out her tablet computer, synched it somehow with the satellite phone in the Cessna, and started pulling up pictures and videos as the jet took off. There were already about thirty cosplay sites that had pictures of ‘Phoenix’ from the San Diego Comic Con, and a few video sites had short clips that included her. Alex was just glad that not a ton of them had ‘Kitty Pryde’ in there, too.

Alex said, “I got video of her as Phoenix, and Rogue, and Psylocke, and Dazzler. She was awesome.”

Graham asked, “So how was it being a real superhero and cosplaying as a fake superhero?”

“Weird,” Alex admitted. “And then I needed to run up to the room and change from a superheroine costume into a different superheroine costume to stop another super-crook, and that was just freaky.”

But after they looked at pictures and videos for a while, Jo finally asked, “Do you know why the colonel’s summoning us without a full explanation?”

Alex looked at Willow, and Willow just looked at her. Alex finally said, “Umm, maybe? But if I’m right, I shouldn’t talk about it until we get there.”

Willow cautiously said, “It’s not good news, I mean, it’s not drastically super-bad news, but it’s not of the good, and I’m pretty sure I know, but if I was wrong and I said all this stuff, it would be a problem, and Jack would give me that look, and it’s already hard enough to get him to —”

Alex used a little telekinesis to hold Willow’s lips together, because she had a really good idea what Willow was going to say next, and it was not really okay to say in front of Jack’s staff.

Willow glared at her, and when Alex let go, Willow said, “Okay, that was freaksome. And maybe I was about to say something totally not safe for work that Jack would not want me to say in front of his people.”

Jo asked, “Because …?”

Alex said, “They’re dating, and sometimes Willow gives TMI.”

Graham groaned. “I absolutely do not want to hear that about the colonel, okay?”

But Jo didn’t have a ‘oh no’ expression. Alex thought that if Graham and the pilots weren’t around, Jo might have asked for lots of juicy details.

Jo and Graham had paperwork to do, and Willow had a programming problem she was working on, and so Alex ended up pulling out her tablet and doing a bunch more of the on-line C course. Which got Willow talking to her about C and structured programming and elements of C, and that was a lot more interesting than you’d think, because Willow knew just a ton of cool stuff about the history of programming, and why some of the C stuff was the way it was. And every time Willow talked about what ‘structured programming’ meant to her, it really made a ton of sense. With a few hints from Willow, Alex made a huge amount of progress on her computer course lessons.

Also, Willow showed Alex what she had cooked up for the thirty-four Terawatt cosplayers who had run to Alex’s rescue in San Diego, and then had given Willow their name and email address. Willow had set up a dummy account so each of the Terawatts got two hundred bucks of PayPal funds to do whatever they liked on the internet. The only problem was that Willow did it by really putting $6,800 in an account, and she wouldn’t let Alex pay her back for any of it.

When they got to the base in West Virginia, Alex watched out the window. She hadn’t paid much attention the last time she flew in, because she was focusing on Hanna’s injuries at the time. There were two huge runways crossing each other in a tall, thin ‘X’ with huge hangars off to the left side of each end of the ‘X’, but a little river ran between the airfield and the base. And going up on the ridge behind the base was just a ton of housing: apartment blocks and rows of zero-lot-line houses and all kinds of stuff, all the way up to some nice houses with yards that were up toward the top of the ridge. But between the housing and the river were several dozen military-looking buildings, some of them newer than the others. And there was a mess hall and a bunch of stuff Alex could pick out just by looking. She wondered where the kids went to school, and that kind of stuff. Maybe there was a nearby town with the school and stuff.

The plane landed and taxied to one hangar, where a Humvee was waiting for them with Sergeant Scott standing beside it. Willow put her sunglasses and trenchcoat back on, so she looked very spy-ish. Graham had a long trenchcoat and huge black sunglasses and a big fedora for Alex, too, maybe so she wouldn’t be obviously Terawatt. The sergeant saluted stiffly for Jo and Graham, and rushed them into the Humvee.

Once they were in the Humvee and the sergeant was driving them across one of the bridges into the main base area, he said, “We need to not talk about any of this outside the conference room. Not even in the jet on the way home, or on base. Colonel’s orders.”

Alex figured that meant Jack was really, really concerned about stuff.

They disembarked at a two-story building that out front said ‘DHS’ and underneath that, ‘HWAAA’. On the entry door, it said, ‘Headquarters, Department of Homeland Security, Hazardous Waste Assessment Amelioration and Abatement’. Wow, that sounded extremely boring. She wondered how many people on the base knew what Jack’s group really did. But there was an armed patrol just inside the door. And the guards checked each of them for electronic bugs and stuff.

She and Willow hung up their trenchcoats inside the front door, and the sergeant led all four of them to a nice little conference room with a conference table in the middle, and chairs around it, and then more chairs around the wall, and a table over to the side that had a ton of food and drinks, where the drinks were a big thing of hot coffee, a smaller thing of hot water with teabags in front of it, and a small cooler full of ice and soda. The food was stacks of sandwiches. Alex grabbed a paper plate and two napkins, used her telekinesis to grab a Diet Coke and six sandwiches, and took a seat at the table.

Jack and Riley and Walter were already there, so she said hi. A few minutes later, Bill Lee came in with the two scientists who had been playing ‘parapsychologist’ when the invisible jock beat them up with a steel pipe. She was really glad they were okay, because getting hit in the head with a steel pipe by a psycho would not be fun. And then two ordinary-looking guys came in wearing really geeky shirts, and Willow gave them happy waves. So Alex went over and introduced herself. It was captainmal and jackryanrules, who were really excited to meet Terawatt for real. That was kind of embarrassing. And Grover and Hanna came in with two military guys Alex didn’t know. And finally, General Hammond came in, too.

Jack did all the introductions, so she knew the two scientists were actually Dr. Kiel and Dr. Schwartz, and the two new military guys were Captain Fisher and Lieutenant Marshall. From the way Lieutenant Marshall was talking with Dr. Schwartz about some biophysics research, Alex figured the lieutenant was another science guy.

Then Jack got down to business. With a frown he said, “I’m not happy, but it’s not anyone in this room. You need to know that up front. I’m really happy with the work of everyone in here, even if there have been one or two slip-ups over the course of the year. The problem is external, and it’s serious enough that we’re going to pretend this meeting didn’t take place, and we’re not recording it, and you’re not going to have any notes in any kind of format that might get walked off with later.”

Boy, that did not sound good.

Jack said, “Everyone in here knows about Finn and Klar’s expedition to Downingtown this summer. The town was under the assumption that the EPA was letting them off the hook in exchange for a secret little wastewater treatment plant experiment and a whole heap of under-the-table cooperation, and also that the Department of Health and Human Services was helping out with a nice, big grant they really needed. Both of those assumptions were wrong, as it turns out. But things are worse than that. Klar rescued an encrypted hard drive. We gave Acid Burn a copy and sent the physical drive to the NSA. It took Acid Burn ten days on a massive parallel processing structure to crack the encryption. That means the NSA should have cracked it in …”

He looked at captainmal, who guessed, “Probably six hours, on average. Twelve hours tops, even if they chose a really unlucky starting point.”

Jack went on, “They never cracked it. We got a note that they’re having to step up refinements on their decryption efforts, because it may not be a standard single-encryption process.” He gave Willow a raised eyebrow.

She bubbled, “Well, it is a tricky encryption system, but it’s not like we haven’t seen stuff like this before. It’s a lot like some of the special encryption-decryption techniques P$ychon4ut used when he was sneaking ‘line noise’ past firewalls to put files in places where they’d decrypt and do bad stuff later, so it’s not as sophisticated and hard to crack as, say, the very best trapdoor functions. It still took me a couple days to get stuff worked out, and there’s maybe a quarter of the data I’m still working on. But there’s no way the NSA couldn’t crack this like an egg.”

“And, Miss … Burn, what did you learn?” asked the general.

She grinned. “Oh! Well, there’s not as much information as you’d really want on the stuff we’re interested in, but he was writing up reports on all the projects and the scientists for his bosses, so we got names. He really did not trust Maggie Walsh. He said she was a great biochemist and geneticist, but was not the kind of person he would recommend to get to move up in their secret organization. Which they call The Collective. In all his stuff, he was ‘Mister Jones’ and his boss was ‘Mister Johnstone’ so not a lot of information from that. And from what he wrote, it’s all split up in cells, all over the world. And he thought that stupid blob monster was a really good approach for what he called Plan A.”

“More like ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ if you ask me,” Jack snarked.

Willow complained, “But some of the other projects had names that sounded just as freaky, and if a man-eating giant blob is a good approach for what they want to do, that’s a pretty scary concept. I mean, what are they up to? Figuring out something that can eat the entire Middle East? And that still makes no sense, because one of them let some of their pet blob monster loose on the town. Oh, and Maggie Walsh was definitely at that lab, because she shopped a few times a week at that grocery store you got me the security footage from. She likes strawberries a lot.”

Jack frowned. “So now we may have someone in the EPA working for The Collective, and maybe someone in the DH&HS, and probably an NSA agent who was close enough to the decryption process of our drive to make it look like the analysis just failed. Or we may have lots of someones all over the place. And if Walsh is connected, then maybe someone like Marissa Weigler of the CIA was connected to this. And we have those fake companies being run and paid off using every international bank that won’t play nice with our State Department. So we have a possible international conspiracy that I really don’t want to know we’re onto them until we have at least a few names and some idea of their scope.”

General Hammond glared. “And I will be keeping this quiet except for a briefing to the President and the Joint Chiefs, and not even discussing it with my adjutant until you have more intel on this Collective for me.”

Riley carefully said, “Thank you sir, because an organization ruthless enough to deliberately develop something like that blob will probably not worry too much about direct assassinations.”

Jo added, “And even with Agent Weigler and her ‘auxiliary assets’ now out of the picture, it’s pretty unlikely they don’t have as many wetwork personnel as they need.”

Alex had no idea what that meant, but before she could say something stupid, Grover put his hand up and asked, “What’s wetwork?”

Jack grimaced. “It’s a classic CIA slang term for killing people.”

Eww.

Jack continued, “So that’s why we don’t discuss this outside this room or my office, and we definitely don’t bring it up with anyone like our moms or girlfriends who aren’t particularly security-oriented. There could be moles in any part of this base outside the SRI. So we just go on about our jobs until we have more intel about who and what we’re facing.”

Hanna asked, “And there are no moles in the SRI?”

Jack replied, “If someone in this room is one of the moles, then we’re already …” He glanced at the general and changed the word he’d almost said. “… hosed. So we assume otherwise. But we don’t broadcast it, even among our coworkers, since we like them and we don’t want them to be horribly tortured for information and then killed.”

Jack then continued, “Next piece of the puzzle. Homer and Jethro, you’re up.”

The two IT guys stood up. Captainmal started talking. “We knew which NSA group got the disk drive to decrypt, so we went through the NSA personnel database and their org charts and talked over beer and D&D with a couple guys we know, and we came up with a total of only eight NSA guys who could have tampered with the decryption process, even if there’s a few dozen ways to keep it from finding the right results.”

Jackryanrules turned on a computer projector and put up pictures on the whiteboard next to Jack. Alex blinked, because seven of the guys looked like typical programmer guys, a couple of them nerdier than others, but one guy looked like a movie star pretending to be a programmer.

Jack started singing the Sesame Street jingle, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong …”

Jo stated, “Sir, I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but what is a guy who looks like that doing in the NSA nerd bullpens?”

Captainmal said, “Oh, yeah. Twenty-nine-year-old up-and-comer Gerard Roger Newsom, already promoted to assistant team leader because he’s also good at the organizational and bureaucratic and management parts. The guys we know all hate him. He’s the super-aggressive, stomp-on-your-face-on-his-way-to-the-top kind of guy. His boss, Dr. Pat Morrison, loves him, because Gerard crushes all problems first so Pat doesn’t have to be the badguy and can spend more time working with the number theory behind general trapdoor algorithms. Our contacts may have given us a biased view of things. We figure they would all pretty much prefer that if there’s a mole it’s Newsom, and not one of their friends, because their friends hate the guy.”

Jack said, “So we start with Gerard. Find out everything you possibly can about that guy. I wanna know who he’s dating, who his friends are, what type of toothpaste he buys, whether he likes Kirk or Picard, who he picked on in junior high, you name it.”

Riley asked, “Are we looking at Bond Syndrome, colonel?”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe. He might’ve gotten the promotion partly because of the whole ‘I’m too cool for school’ factor.”

Captainmal said, “His file says he was a huge sports star in high school, played college football until a knee injury, double major in computer science and political science, completed an M.B.A. since he went to work for the NSA, and he’s currently working on a Ph.D. in computer science. He’s pretty much got ‘future director of the NSA’ stamped on his forehead in Unicode.”

Jack nodded. “Got that. So we look into this guy as our prime suspect, but we don’t drop the seven other guys just because the programmer types there hate him. And seriously, Gerard? He played football, and his name’s Gerard?”

Since that was the end of the conversation on the NSA, Jack had Willow do her bit. She stood up and started, “Okay, I did some checking the way I’m not supposed to, and I found a bunch of stuff. The EPA files on Downingtown were changed. It could’ve been from the inside, but someone else cracked their firewall years ago — it looks like a typical P$ychon4ut attack and according to the dates on the files it was done before he went away — and left a cuckoo’s egg in with the system executables, and it’s been touched since then, but not since the Downingtown files were touched. So maybe someone external used that hole and got inside and fiddled with the Downingtown computer files. I left it there and just put a tripwire on it, so if whoever comes back to do something similar and uses the same approach, we ought to get a heads-up.

“But the EPA didn’t just drop the case. Their files told them the problem was addressed, so it got shunted off into the not-so-important stuff. So then I checked the firewall at the Department of Health and Human Services, and it doesn’t show any signs like that, so maybe the same attacker didn’t go there, or maybe a different cracker did that job, or maybe they didn’t have to enter their systems at all. The DH&HS records say they issued the grant money to Downingtown on direct authorization from the White House. But the White House database says they didn’t issue that authorization. So either a really great cracker or team of crackers is at work here, or someone way inside the system is using it expertly and covering his tracks.”

Jack glumly said, “Or both.”

General Hammond sternly asked, “Young lady, how is it that you were able to get into secure EPA and DH&HS and White House files like this? Because I didn’t issue Colonel O’Neill any such authorization, and I didn’t have my people get him any privileges on any of those systems.”

Willow sort of cringed, “Well, you see, Jack didn’t ask me to do any of this, I just knew it needed to be checked on, and I knew I couldn’t ask the SRI to crack these systems, but they’re not a hundred percent secure, and I know a lot about systems like this, so it wasn’t that awful getting in, and I even put a couple patches on the White House system while I was inside because you really should have better security on the President’s stuff, and let me tell you, they really need to upgrade their website software too before someone hacks it and does something evil or at least really embarrassing, and I didn’t hurt anything, and it really needs to be done to protect people.”

Jack smiled smugly. “Did I tell you that she backhacked the Brits, the French, the Spanish, and the Germans all at the same time during the Berlin thing?”

General Hammond looked grouchier. “Colonel O’Neill, when I gave you carte blanche to acquire top personnel, I did not mean for you to acquire the most dangerous cracker on the planet! Who is she, really? S4l1x680? P$ychon4ut? ShadowCrew? Dark Dante?”

“I’m Willow Rosenberg, the CEO of Red Tree Software.”

Jack added, “She’s one of the group who tracked down P$ychon4ut and put him away on unrelated charges.”

Willow smiled maliciously. “Felony charges. In Texas. He’s a real creepazoid.”

Jack said, “Terawatt brought her to the mix. There’s a story about how they met, but it’s not my secret to tell, and anyway, you’d think I was clinically insane if I told you.”

Alex confessed, “It involves a trip I took to an alternate dimension.”

General Hammond carefully asked, “Does it involve anything directly related to our national security?”

Alex said, “No sir, I don’t think so.”

He cautiously told her, “Well, then, maybe I don’t need to know that part of things.”

Jack went on, “Sir, we have gotten several points of verification off her story about that trip, including finding out about Maggie Walsh before she got loose in our program, and finding out about the new hotshot data analyst the SIS just acquired. That makes me inclined to believe pretty much everything else she tells me about that event.”

General Hammond started to reply, and then he stopped and stared at Willow. His jaw dropped open, and he muttered, “Good God almighty. Salix. How did we never figure that out?”

Jack pretended he had no idea what the general was talking about. “Umm, sir? Salix?”

General Hammond glared. “Don’t play dumb with me, colonel. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Salix is the genus for willows. It was my late wife’s favorite tree. I have four pussy willows in my back yard that I planted for her by myself. Salix discolor. You’re S4l1x680. So what’s the 680 part? A rose varietal?”

Willow blushed. “Good guess. It’s umm, 680 nanometers, in the red portion of the visible light spectrum.”

He asked, “But you’re really Willow Rosenberg, the CEO of Red Tree Software that had the financial battle with Oracle?”

Willow nodded unhappily. “Yeah.”

Captainmal slapped his forehead. “DOH! No wonder she can walk through our firewall whenever she wants to! I’m so STUPID!”

General Hammond glared at him, and he quickly wilted. “Son, would you like to explain that remark?”

Captainmal winced, “There are three really popular programs that different unix firewalls use for packet filtering. The second most popular one is a lovely bit of open source C code … that she wrote.”

Jack said, “And she wrote it when she was … what? Sixteen?”

Willow smiled merrily. “Thirteen! I wrote it when I was teaching myself about network security, and I thought the packet filtering stuff on my box needed work.”

General Hammond flinched, but still asked her, “And Oracle bought you out to get some sort of database technology that you designed that they plan to put all over the internet?” She nodded. “And they’ll probably license it to everyone else?” She nodded again. He finally said, “I fear for the security of this planet if we ever piss you off.”

Willow pouted, “I was really mad at Larry and my VCs, and I didn’t do anything then. Well, I got my mom to tell everyone in her family what her cousin did, because he’s the VC who I went to originally, and he’s the one who really did the big shafting thing, and if he hadn’t been a complete money-grubbing scumbag, Larry would have had to settle for buying the company and eating all the poison pills we set up, or licensing the technology from us for big bucks and not being able to keep us from licensing it to everyone else.” She looked down at her hands. “And maybe I got copies of his old emails he wrote to my other VCs where he was talking about shafting me, and I sent them to all his other clients and the people he wanted to get as new clients.”

Jack said, “That’s all very interesting, but the bottom line is that the best hacker on the planet is doing her best to help the DHS, and it’s in our interest to protect her. So S4l1x680 no longer exists, and P$chon4ut is put away in the pokey.”

Willow added, “Dark Dante is doing security audit work for big bucks these days like Kevin Mitnick, and ShadowCrew is in the slammer for twenty years, even though he totally deserved more time than that, and they know who Solo is and he’s in huge trouble and spending all his time fighting extradition to America. So not all that many major crackers on the loose right now. Except this ‘maybe’ that I’m worried about.”

General Hammond asked, “If the U.S. Government asked Willow Rosenberg and Red Tree Software to do a full investigation of DHS systems starting with our firewalls, would you be willing to do it? For, say, ten million dollars?”

Willow glanced over at Jack and said, “Well, sure, but I, umm, I’d do it for free …”

The general nodded. “I believe you, young lady. But this is the kind of thing that the GAO and Congress like to see real cash dollars behind, so they believe it’s all on the up and up. And you’d have to write complete documentation on your recommendations. And if we do have cracker teams out there hitting government intranets, I’d like our firewalls and systems hardened as soon as you can manage.”

She told him, “Actually, I can get started on that tonight.”

He smiled warmly. “It’ll take me a few days to force a few bean-counters to comply, so I think you can safely wait until Monday.”

She timidly added, “I already beefed up the protection on the SRI computers even though no one said I could, if that’s okay.”

He nodded. “Good. And I’m going to write this as a twelve-month project, using end of fiscal year grant money, so you will have official permission to go wandering through DHS computers anytime in the next twelve months. If you find anything the colonel or I ought to know about, I’d appreciate a heads-up ASAP.”

She smiled nervously. “Oh, sure, that goes without saying. So if there’s a guy watching streaming porn through your firewall or sending emails to a child porn network that uses a server in Bulgaria …”

The general turned a little red, but he said, “Get incontrovertible evidence, shut it down, and help the Inspector General put that person in prison for misuse of government property and anything else you can think of.”

Jack cautiously asked, “You haven’t really found those on our computers, have you?”

Willow hastily said, “Oh, no, the streaming porn guy is in the EPA at the DC office, and the child porn guy is DH&HS. I just happened to do some pre-processing of ingoing and outgoing data streams at their firewalls, because it’s a handy way of picking up invaders and crackers and maybe some new passwords from people going through VPNs if they’re careless, and my software flagged both those guys.”

“What is ‘stream ing porn’?” Hanna asked with a confused look on her face. Grover leaned over and whispered in her ear until her eyes bulged.

Jack pretended he hadn’t seen that. “Okay, we may have a skilled cracker or team of crackers infiltrating our national systems. Or it may be a skilled insider using the bureaucracy the way only bureaucrats would. Willow, your task is to assume it’s a cracker and track him.”

“Or her,” Willow insisted brightly.

“Okay, it,” Jack decided. He pointed at captainmal and jackryanrules. “Our internal IT will assume it’s a skilled insider and find him. Or her. Or it. Or them.”

Jack continued, “Now we still have a lot of tasks we can’t designate yet. But here are the topics I want us to talk about while we eat lunch. Where are the other cells? What are they doing? What is The Collective up to as a whole? And why would anyone think releasing a blob monster where it could go eat Philadelphia was a good idea?”

The general suddenly pulled out his cell phone and winced. “Colonel, may I use your office for a few minutes? I’ve got a Code Red.”

Jack said, “Of course, sir. Major Finn? Escort the general to my office and then stand guard outside to ensure he has privacy.”

“Yes, sir,” Riley said crisply.

But once the general was out of the room, the IT guys rushed off to go check email and programs and stuff, and Willow went and sat so close to Jack she was practically in his lap, and Jo followed Graham out to an office where they could eat lunch while they checked on anything going on with their base in New Mexico, and they took Lieutenant Marshall with them since it looked like he was going to be part of their group. So Alex sat with Hanna and Grover and just chatted while she ate.

Hanna grinned. “Grover has some very good news! It’s top secret, so don’t tell anyone else.”

Grover explained, “I managed to splice some human genes into a sheep embryo and create a sheep that my compound could work on, and after a couple of months of experiments I got it to go invisible permanently!”

Alex didn’t get it at first. “Umm … great?”

He just sounded so happy as he told her, “So Mom is carding invisible wool off it, and Cindy is learning to turn that into thread and how to weave thread into fabric, so we’re going to make invisible wool thread and knit me invisible clothes, and Mom thinks she can make some heavy invisible-felt booties, too.”

Hanna nodded. “We can also weave a rope out of the invisible wool and I can teach Grover how to tie a ‘monkey fist’ knot in one end and have a soft version of a chain fighter’s equipment, plus a very effective garrote. And when the lamb is older and Grover has enough clothes, then maybe he can have invisible-lamb jerky to eat on assignments and not have to worry about his food being visible either. And several bones would make very effective daggers, and since the bones are invisible, Grover could have more weapons.”

Eww. That was a gross thought. She didn’t mind eating lamb, but she didn’t want to know the lamb personally first. That would be like eating your pet or something. It obviously didn’t bother Hanna a bit, but Alex knew Hanna was used to hunting down animals and killing them and eating them and making clothes out of them and everything else. Okay, Hanna probably didn’t get the whole ‘having an animal as a pet’ deal.

Maybe getting to go see Riley’s parents’ farm would be a good thing for Hanna.

The general came back in, looking a little ashen. That couldn’t be good. Riley was right behind him, looking sort of concerned. The general snapped, “Colonel, get your other key people in here pronto, and tell your IT men to stay out.” Jack called Graham, and in under a minute, Graham and Jo were back in the room.

Glowering, the general said, “This is not to leave this room. Less than three hours ago, the mainland Chinese nuked three of their own cities. There was an outbreak of … something in Lanzhou, and apparently their police force couldn’t contain it, then their military couldn’t contain it, and it moved downstream with the river, whatever it is. The Chinese government nuked Lanzhou and everything downriver for fifty kilometers, and they have warned everyone downstream of Lanzhou not to drink the water until further notice. The President has not been able to get information out of the Chinese leaders, but the entire area around Lanzhou is on some sort of military alert.”

Jack said, “Sounds like they just had their own blob incident, only they didn’t have an SRI or a Terawatt.”

General Hammond grimaced. “Or their own GC-161 incident, or their own Desert Research Institute incident, or something even worse. At any rate, the Chinese are trying extra hard to crack down on political dissent and information dispersal right now, but they had to tell us and the Russians and the EU what the detonations meant, so they wouldn’t suddenly get bombed back to the Stone Age by everyone else on Earth.”

Jack frowned. “Well, I guess we know what Plan A is for these whackos.”

 
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