The Merchant of Secrets Read online

  CHAPTER 1

  The greatest vulnerability in the United States defense and intelligence organizations is its satellite networks. These Top Secret networks are the vital links that run all of the defense and intelligence communication and machinery including battlefield command and control, guided missile systems, homeland warning systems, and spy drones that give us visibility into the nuclear proliferation in Iran and elsewhere.

  In 2010 in response to a 2008 incident at an army base in the Middle East, and a wave of new cyber-attacks that eclipsed Al-Qaeda in terms of the level of threat to the United States, a new U.S. Cyber command was assembled at Ft. Meade, Maryland to coordinate an effort to protect networks against foreign intelligence agencies seeking unauthorized access to Top Secret files. In the spring of 2011 the President named Cyberspace the Fourth Battlefield Domain, alongside Air, Land and Sea. At about the same time, and a short distance from the White House, Lockheed Martin Corporation which manufactures US warplanes and missiles was illegally accessed and top secret designs of future defense programs were stolen.

  One day at the US base camp located in the Middle East, a soldier awoke, and logged into his government issued computer designated for classified material. He inserted a flash drive into the laptop unaware that the flash drive had been loaded with malware from a foreign intelligence service. Within seconds the virus raced through the army network destroying highly sophisticated software running the satellite communications which, from thousands of feet into space, identified enemy positions and communicated those positions to the troops in the field. The command and control system was knocked out leaving the troops, some as young as eighteen and nineteen years old, dislocated and not knowing where the enemy was; operating blind in hostile environment.

  CHAPTER 2

  About 8:30 in the morning on a bright, sunny December day, I was stuck in heavy traffic sipping a piping- hot cup of coffee and mentally editing a few paragraphs of The National Counterintelligence Executive’s Report on cyber spying written late the night before. It needed rewriting to correct errors made when the combination of stress and fatigue had overwhelmed the author’s better judgment in the early hours of the morning. The holiday brew was just the perfect temperature, filling the car with a delicious aroma as I sat at a traffic light, completely lost in thought. The annual cost of cyber-attacks was skyrocketing surpassing all other forms of attack to become the greatest single threat to our national security. Attacks on our “national infrastructure”, electrical grids and water systems, was causing panic within the intelligence community and we were lobbying the President for more money to raise the level of funding to match the level of threat. My job was to identify and react to attacks on government and civilian networks which in December 2010, included the “Poison Ivy “virus, invented by a Chinese hacker and made available on the internet for anyone with a grudge and mediocre talents to wield against the U.S.. The jolt of caffeine was just beginning to take effect when my phone rang on the passenger seat beside me.

  To be quietly content while stuck in a traffic would seem strange to most people, but normalcy even if it means being stuck on a highway at 8 a.m., is a prize to be coveted whether or not the other drivers sharing the road saw it that way. To be alive, healthy and free and driving in a car to work is a privilege that comes with a heavy price. Thousands of people like me, by the nature of our commitment to our country immerse ourselves in a world of darkness every day to bear the burdens of our national security like a cross upon our shoulders, to protect our right to do normal things, like getting stuck in a darn traffic jam on our way to work. So I didn’t mind at all.

  I placed the cup of caffeinated bliss in my cup holder, before stretching my right arm to grab the phone now ringing off of the passenger seat. It’s was Sara’s number lit-up in green. Sara was an old friend from back home in Illinois. Years had passed with little communication from her except when she ran into some sort of trouble with a boyfriend, or missed a flight, or some other personal crisis like hearing noises in her apartment that she thought were a burglar. I was late for work and hoping that this time it wouldn’t take long.

  “Hi Sara, how are you?”

  “It’s Taylor,” she replied in a wisp of a voice.

  “What’s up with Taylor?” I asked.

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “No….he’s dead,” she said.

  “He had an accident on the ski slopes. He’d been drinking with his friends then decided to go back up for more skiing…….” Her voice began to tremble at first, but quickly gave way to wails of despair interrupted by short gasps to get air into her lungs. It would be impossible to get the story out of her now. The sounds of her grief-stricken voice resonating through the phone gave clear indication that there was only one thing to do; I took a day off from work and headed immediately to New York.

  “I’ll be there this afternoon,” I declared, “just relax.”

  Mulling over logistics would have taken too much time, so I drove directly to Union Station in the center of Washington D.C. and caught the next train to New York City. Sara was untested at coping with any sort of human tragedy and now, as she was face-to-face with death for the very first time, I worried about her ability to deal with the blow. There was no way of knowing how deep the pain was for her or what harm she might bring herself to assuage it, so to be on the safe side I decided to just show up at her door.

  Penn Station in New York was dirty, ugly and jam-packed with hoards of holiday travelers pushing their way through the crowd so that they could lay claim to a seat on their train before somebody else grabbed it. The frenzied masses knocked me back and forth until I reached the exit door and was able to escape the madness for a breath of fresh air. Outside, the streets were buzzing with bumper to bumper traffic, street vendors, and constructions workers, all of which were over shadowed by the enormous billboards and skyscrapers towering above. How different New York is from Washington. Yellow taxis swarmed around the train station so I signaled to one with an arm extended, and the kindly Indian driver took me uptown, to Sara’s building on 60th street.

  On the tenth floor, I rang the bell, and waited for the sound of slippers to pad across the floor. When the door opened her gaunt face slowly emerged from the darkened apartment, then immediately recoiled back into the semi-dark, as she drew-up her hand to shield her bloodshot eyes from the burst of unwanted light coming in from hallway. Through her tee shirt and flannel pajama pants, I could see that she was waif- thin. It seemed that she hadn’t eaten in days. Without a word Sara turned her back as if nobody had been at the door to silently shuffle back across the room and to sink into the comfort of a large overstuffed sofa where she had been nestled since early that morning. She curled-up in the fetal position and hugged a pillow tightly, too aggrieved to be consoled by anyone, including her friend standing at the doorway who had taken the train from Washington. A faint slow melody was coming from Sara’s laptop, and like a warm blanket it comforted her and gave relief from the heavy silence in the apartment. She was trying to deal with the pain the best she could but seemed completely disconnected from her surroundings, preferring instead to find refuge in an ethereal place out of reach of the pain which mercilessly pursued her. An inordinate stillness so unlike New York had befallen the apartment and the darkened room echoed a profound sadness.

  In the kitchen I helped myself to a glass of wine from an already opened bottle and began washing her dishes. A few minutes later Sara lumbered into the kitchen and with rivers of tears streaking down her face she tried to explain the chronology of events that led to Taylor’s death, but her jumbled narrative was hard to follow. Taylor had gone to Vermont for a week
of skiing with friends and at the end of a good day on the slopes the friends gathered in a restaurant at the base of the mountain to unwind over a meal and drinks, but Taylor wasn’t hungry so he only drank, and didn’t eat anything. A couple of shots of whiskey and a couple of beers later, Taylor returned to the mountain to get in a few more runs before nightfall would descend on the slopes and the ski patrol would close the ski lift for the evening, but while racing down the mountain at a speed which normally was within his ability to manage, this time Taylor’s skis hit a patch of ice so that instead of turning back toward the center of the slope as he had wanted them to do, they failed to turn beneath his feet. Careening off of the edge of the run he struggled in vain to cushion his fall with his arms and to protect his head but his body slammed into a tree with a violent force fracturing his skull and dropping him to the ground. By the time the ski patrol arrived to help him he was unresponsive. The lethal combination of alcohol and speed took Taylor’s life that night.

  When Sara finished telling the story of her husband’s death, she let out a long sigh of emotional exhaustion and deflated into her chair while grabbing a tissue from a box on the table to wipe away the water gathering in her swollen eyes. We sat in silence for a pensive moment while I struggled to find something to say that might be of comfort but words were too hard to find for someone who had lost the man of her life so soon, at the age of thirty-four. I begged her to come stay with me in Washington D.C. believing that a change of scenery would do her good. She hung her head and smiled at the thought of staying in my small apartment.

  “Thanks, but I want to just get through the next few days,” she said, and smiled appreciatively.

  “I know,” I replied, “but I’m concerned about you, and don’t want you to be so far away.” I was speaking from the heart. She wrapped her arms around me in a hug and said, “I’ll think about it.”

  While Sara and I were sipping our glasses of wine, my office mate called to inform me that someone had set himself on fire in Tunisia. The “Arab Spring” was taking flight.

  It had been important to be there for Sara in her hour of need, and I very much wanted to stay longer but the developments in the Middle East required me to return to work by Monday. I had to go back anyway, the army was eager for us to complete our network integration evaluations, so that weaknesses in the army’s system architecture could be found and analyzed. We were fighting multiple cyber spying wars with limited resources. It wasn’t enough to protect and defend our systems; we also had to locate and identify the hackers then document our findings for the State Department so they could confront the foreign governments sponsoring the attacks. So duty called.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was about 7:00pm and Colin was hanging around the administrative assistant’s desk when he heard me rounding the corner. “Hey Caroline, where have you been all day? Taking on the world?” he joked as he turned to see me.

  “Yes that’s it. Me against the world,” I responded sarcastically.

  “Hey really, you can tell me,” he teased.

  “You know I can’t Colin,” I replied.

  “Okay, I’ll coax it out of you over drinks.”

  “I need to check my email and phone messages, I’ll be right out.” Colin was never boring, so I decided to go with him.

  “Hurry-up, I’ll meet you in the lobby” he said, wrapping his jacket around him and zipping it up in defense against the chilly air outside. The brutish building constructed in cement and steel was one of over 30 Top Secret facilities built around the Washington D.C. area since September 11, 2001. The driveway into the compound and leading up to the building was built with a strong curve to break the speed of any suicide bomber trying to ram the building at high speed. Huge cement blockades lined the sidewalk of the entrance to block a vehicular attack. Outside of each glass door there was a metal plate in ground that would rise up at the push of a security officer’s button, to prevent someone unwanted from entering through the door. Laser scanners emitting a green light electronically paroled the inside of the lobby while cameras were hidden in the structure from floor to ceiling. The first floor was all one-way security glass enabling someone inside the building to look out but making it impossible to look in.

  My email inbox was full, stuffed with messages mostly about the protests rolling through Tunisia, nuclear scientists in Iran, and drone strikes in Pakistan. After a quick glance I logged- off and locked the door.

  When the elevator doors parted on the first floor, Colin was waiting as promised. He saw me, and leaned forward in his gentlemanly manner to open the heavy glass door leading outside. As I passed through the doorway I unintentionally brushed-up against his stomach and chest, but lingered in that closeness a little too long and he sensed the attraction. Our eyes met and our faces were close enough for a kiss but we hesitated, surrounded by lobby guards and more than a dozen cameras capturing our every move, and decided to find a more discrete place, which would have been just about anywhere, and we moved to the pub across the street from the office.

  When we walked in, the pub was full of people watching football intently, as if they were having a religious experience. They stared upward at two large screens hanging above the bar and never saw us at all, so we felt completely alone and ducked- in to a table in the back corner. The female bartender walked over to us. “Hi, what’re you two having?”

  “The time of my life,” Colin answered playfully, blue eyes twinkling. “Give me a Scotch on the rocks, please.”

  “Okay, and you?” she asked, grinning in my direction.

  “I’ll stick with a glass of Merlot,” I replied.

  “Playing it safe?” Colin teased, as he smiled.

  “If I were playing it safe, I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  “Yes, that’s right come to think of it. So now that your guard’s down, what other daring thing can I talk you into?”

  “Knock it off, Colin. We don’t want the F.B.I. crawling all over our email accounts searching for evidence of an office romance.”

  “Really, you think the F.B.I. would catch us?”

  “Well look at us now. Just the two of us, drinking at a bar after work. That’s gotta arouse some suspicion for anyone looking.”

  He turned and looked at the crowd, “Okay, there’s a few people here from the office, you’re absolutely right. It’s too dangerous. Let’s go back to my place in Georgetown.”

  “Not so fast, wise guy. Seriously, I’ve been in New York for a few days and I need to get caught up. What’s the latest ? I’ve read the reports. This movement in Tunisia is taking on a surprising amount of momentum. The rebels are swarming into the streets and taking over television and radio stations …?”

  “Mulally’s more concerned about Egypt,” Colin said bluntly, referring to our Deputy Director, Michael Mulally who had 20 years in intelligence. “Mubarak’s been a great for the Americans and the U.K. for many years, exiling or imprisoning the Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom swear death to the U.S.A.. Now if civil war spreads to Egypt control of the country will be divided between the Egyptian military and the Islamist Brotherhood. He’s worried about the Islamic extremists getting too strong a foothold in the region, crushing any fledgling democracies that pop up in place of Mubarak and Ben Ali and creating worry within Israel that if they controlled Egypt, they’d help finance the Hamas. Don’t forget how the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1989 after the Americans abruptly left in 1989 and it created a nightmare scenario. It’s important that the Afghan situation doesn’t repeat itself in Egypt and Tunisia.”

  “What’s the consensus on Mubarak’s hold on the situation?” I asked.

  “Mubarak met with POTUS (President Of The United States), and assured him that just like Nasser, he would put down the revolt.”

  “Yea, and how many people would his army slaughter doing that?” I asked.

  “I gotta tell ya’… thirteen U.S. intelligence agencies with offices throughout the Middle East, and they miss some
thing as big as Tunisia? I wouldn’t be betting that they’re right on Egypt either,” Colin replied.

  “I agree,” I replied. “We were blindsided, now we have to catch up.”

  Colin took a swig of his drink, then put it down, and assumed a more analytical posture. “Mulally’s also a little concerned about the Iran-Pakistan oil pipeline which’ll give Iran enormous influence over Pakistan’s energy, and hence over Pakistan’s economy and government. We’ve got a lot of people on the ground monitoring both those situations now, with the U.S. sanctions in place, that should cut down on oil exports from Iran by about fifty percent.” Just then a thunderous burst of enthusiasm erupted over a touchdown, Colin turned his shoulders and rotated his head to survey the excitement.

  “And what about the American guy who shot the innocent people in Lahore (Pakistan)? I guess the investigation is going nowhere? That would be a shame to drop the investigation. That shooting cost us a lot of diplomatic levering power,” I said.

  Colin swiveled back around .“Well the diplomatic cost can be remedied in exchange for money.”

  “Oh come on, Colin. The Pakistanis are impassioned people. It’s too simple to suggest that they’ll be consoled easily with money. They’re angry that we’ve treated them disrespectfully. And the Islamists will never be consoled. They hate us.”

  “Money goes a long way in a country that can’t provide electricity for many of its citizens. Anyway, Mulally’s more concerned about the Haqqani tribe capitalizing on this incident to incite further distrust of America within Pakistan, and to use it to increase its own popularity at the expense of the West. He’s concerned about the Haqqani gaining more influence in Pakistani Parliament. That’ll be tougher to reverse. Once they’re in power, it’s difficult to change” Colin responded, referring to the network of pro-Taliban mafia that brutally control their own interests in Pakistan including the all- important trade routes through Pakistan to Afghanistan that were essential for NATO to get armaments, food and health care to its troops. “And those supply routes had been in place since the Reagan era to haul weapons into Afghanistan for the mujahedeen, and we’ve never had much difficulty in over 20 years. Now the Pakistani military wants to scalp the U.S. and United Nations on fees for allowing cargo trailers to use their damn route.” He shook his head from side to side and tightened his lips.