“Whatever.” Jessie turned her attention back to the video playing.
Mary dismissed Jessie’s comment as…well, just Jessie. She craned her neck to look at the computer. The girls were watching some kind of animal in a crib. It had its paws on the railing and seemed to have a silly expression on its face. “What in the world is that?”
“A sloth,” said Jessie.
“A what?”
“A two-toed South American tree sloth,” said Grace between giggles. “Isn’t he cute?”
Mary turned away to wipe at a tear, drawing a breath and telling herself to relax. When she looked back at the laptop, she was smiling. “Yes, he is cute,” she said, trying to get in the spirit of things. “You just want to cuddle him, don’t you?”
Jessie sprang up onto an elbow. “Can we get one? Please!”
33
After Mom and Jess left, Grace looked up sloths on Wikipedia. She was fascinated to learn that they slept twenty-three hours a day and that it took them an hour to walk one hundred yards. They really were as slow as everyone said. She decided that she loved sloths, even if her mom had said that there was no way on God’s green earth they were ever getting one.
Grace closed the laptop and sat up. The sudden movement made her wince. Her leg felt as if it were glued to her hip. It didn’t want to move. She looked toward the door to make sure it was closed and no one was watching, then she stood up. It took her a while, and it hurt a lot. She was glad no one could see.
She went into the bathroom and pulled up her nightgown. She prodded her thigh and gasped. Bruises didn’t usually hurt so badly. Maybe it was the other thing. The thought frightened her so much she wanted to cry. She bit on her finger to stop. It wouldn’t be fair to Mommy to tell her. Not now, with Daddy gone. Mommy had enough problems.
Grace limped back to her bed. She spent a minute talking to her father, asking if he was all right. He didn’t answer. She thought that was because he wasn’t in heaven yet. She didn’t really believe in heaven. At least, not like in the Bible. She believed in something else. Something just as good. It was warm and welcoming and somewhere up in the night sky. She knew her dad was there and he’d talk to her when he could.
Grace needed to ask him about the bruise. The doctor said she was all better, but Grace had read lots about the disease that had tried to kill her. She knew that not all girls got cured. Someone had to be one of the two out of ten who didn’t make it.
She took another look at the bruise. She told herself it was from the trampoline. It wasn’t cancer. God wouldn’t do that to their family. Not after taking Dad.
She decided not to tell Mommy about her leg. She didn’t think she could take it right now.
34
“Mine.”
Fort George C. Meade sat on five thousand acres of rolling Maryland countryside twenty-six miles northeast of Washington, D.C. First opened in 1917, it was chosen as the home of the National Security Agency in the 1950s because of its proximity to the nation’s capital. With the Cold War at its peak and the Cuban missile crisis fresh in American minds, Fort Meade was deemed close enough to Washington for easy commuting and far enough away to survive a nuclear attack. Now Fort Meade was home to more than forty thousand employees, many of whom held a top-secret security clearance.
The fort had its own post office, fire department, and police force. Electrified fences ran the length of the installation’s perimeter. Security cameras and motion detectors covered every square foot. To block any electromagnetic signals from escaping, protective copper shielding wrapped every one of the more than 1,300 buildings inside the compound.
Waiting at the checkpoint as his identification was examined, Ian Prince looked through the rows of fences at the rectangular black glass office building a half mile away that housed the headquarters of the nation’s most secretive intelligence organization.
“Mine,” he repeated to himself.
It was the NSA’s mandate to collect and analyze all signals communication and data relating to foreign intelligence, by overt and clandestine means. Thirty years ago that meant intercepting suspicious radio, telephone, and satellite traffic. Today it meant all that plus policing the Internet, not just monitoring all forms of online traffic for clues to evil intent but protecting all United States government communications and information systems from foreign interference and disruption. On this sunny, humid day, Ian and his colleagues had come to offer ONE’s assistance with both objectives.
“Here you are, sir,” said the guard, returning Ian’s ID and those of his passengers, Peter Briggs and Dev Patel. “Welcome to Fort Meade.”
Ian noticed the guard’s quizzical gaze. “Anything wrong?”
It was not his first trip to Fort Meade, or his second, or even his tenth. Since October 2001 he’d been secretly visiting three or four times a year. Each time he got the same dumbfounded look.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be driving,” said the guard. “I thought you’d have a chauffeur.”
“I always drive,” said Ian, giving a salute.
“Yessir. Have a good day.”
The gate rose. Simultaneously the steel Delta barrier sank into the ground. Ian headed down a long winding lane toward the black building, officially known as OPS2A. He remembered the feeling of awe he’d experienced on his first visits, the visceral thrill of being so close to the most powerful data-collection apparatus in the world. It was then that the idea had first come to him.
Over time his awe had tempered as he and ONE became the NSA’s partner, albeit a silent and secret one. Today, as he closed in on his dream, as the changing of the guard grew near, he felt only pride. A father’s pride. One day soon this would all be his.
–
The Emperor was waiting inside the conference room when Ian arrived.
“Good to see you, Ian,” said General Terry Wolfe of the United States Air Force, director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. He was known throughout the intelligence community as the Emperor. “Has it been six months?”
“Seven,” said Ian. “December, I believe.”
Wolfe greeted Patel warmly, addressing him as Dr. Patel. Briggs waited outside.
“Time flies,” said Wolfe, leading them to the table. “Must have been before all that Merriweather nonsense.”
“It was,” said Ian. “That’s all behind us, I take it.”
The “nonsense” was the lengthy investigation conducted by the FBI into allegations of bribery and extortion surrounding ONE’s acquisition of Merriweather Systems. The same allegations Gordon May had made two days before on the airstrip in Reno, though there had never been any mention of complicity in the plane crash that took John Merriweather’s life.
It was in response to these charges that Ian had deemed it necessary to hack into the FBI’s central computer system. He’d been able to gather enough information to put a stop to the FBI’s queries. But the price had been high. His work had not gone unnoticed by the Bureau’s Cyber Investigations Division and Special Agent Joseph Grant.
“The FBI says it is. Who am I to argue?” Wolfe took his place at the head of the conference table and motioned for Ian to sit at his right.
The director of the NSA was of medium height and medium build, with thinning hair, a puffy, pleasant face, and timid blue eyes that blinked often behind rimless eyeglasses. Not so much an emperor as a middle-aged father who’d been up late the night before helping a child with his homework. In his tenure at the helm of the NSA, he had turned a once sleepy, unheralded intelligence agency into the nation’s most vaunted fighter of terrorism. When General Terry Wolfe wanted something, both Congress and the military came running, checkbooks at the ready.