“And that’s not valued?” I asked.
She blew out a long breath and rubbed the back of her neck. “You have to understand, the vast majority of the messages the NSA intercepts have no intelligence value whatsoever. We go for quantity, not quality, and then try to pick the needles out of the haystack. That means that even when we triumph and crack an indecipherable message, it’s just as likely to be somebody’s grocery list as it is to be something important.”
She was trying to lower my expectations, but it wasn’t working. I had dreamed about doing this for so long that nothing she could say would lessen my excitement. I was going to pit my mind against the enemies of the United States, and I was going to win. The shabby facilities, Shaunessy’s disapproval, none of it mattered. I worked for the NSA.
“So, welcome to the team,” Melody said. “Sorry about the seat. We’ll get that replaced, and get you a machine and an account as soon as possible.”
“What’s the noise?” I asked.
She looked confused. “What noise?”
“That constant humming sound. It’s like we’re in a wind tunnel.”
“Ah.” She nodded in comprehension. “I’m so used to it, I don’t hear it anymore. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
We walked back through the cubicles to the back of the room, to a large wooden door with a keypad. Melody passed her badge over the keypad, which beeped and turned its indicator light from red to orange. She pressed a series of numbers. The light turned green, and a heavy clunk indicated an electromagnetic locking system unlatching. She opened the door, and the whirring sound grew much louder.
We walked through into a cavernous room. I couldn’t have been more surprised if the door had led directly to the White House. The ceiling was probably twenty feet high, and we were near the top of it. A flight of stairs led down to the floor. For as far as I could see, there were rows and rows of rack-mounted servers, probably thousands of them. Despite all the heat the machines must generate, the air was frigid.
“The server room,” she said. “And this isn’t the end. We have a hundred thousand square feet of it. Not nearly enough to crack a single properly encoded message with a 128-bit RSA key, mind you. But give us enough information, and we can launch quite an attack on a lot of things.”
There were a few people among the racks, but the room was mostly empty. One person was riding a bicycle down one of the aisles, which seemed like a good idea, given the amount of distance there was to cover. I noticed that the doorway we had come through was significantly thicker than it needed to be and had grooves on both sides. I asked Melody about it.
“There’s a steel cage in the wall above the doorway,” she said. “In the case of an attack on the building, it and others like it would crash down, blocking the entrances and making it extremely difficult for anyone outside this room to get in.”
“And anyone inside to get out,” I said.
“Well, yes. But in the unlikely event that this building is successfully breached by an enemy force, you’re probably safer locked in here than anywhere else.”
I also commented on what looked like a ridiculously large yellow locker marked Emergency. “What are they storing in there, automatic weapons?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” Melody said. “But that’s NSA bureaucracy at its best. It probably took a committee three months to decide on what to put in that locker, and I’ll bet if you actually had an emergency, you’d find it contained every possible thing you could think of, except for the one thing you need.”
We retreated to the office, and Melody closed the door, which latched with an audible clunk. “I have to catch a plane to Germany this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll make sure I get the ball rolling on getting you a machine and an account, but you’ll have to get the team to show you the ropes.”
That took the smile off my face. “Wait. You’re leaving? For how long?”
“Just a week. You’ll be fine. It’ll take a while for you to learn the organization, the security procedures. You’ll have some more mandatory classes to take. The week will go quickly. Just do me a favor.”
“What?”
“No more trouble with security. I don’t think I could rescue you a third time.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
She held my gaze. “I hope your best is good enough. I want you to be here when I get back.”
CHAPTER 9
“I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “Seriously. Come on, you know that.”
Paul and I were playing Scrabble again, and surprisingly, he was up on points. He had used all his letters with the near-miraculous word zugzwang (using a blank tile for the second Z), which he placed on a double word score for a total of ninety-five points. It was rattling my sense of the balance of the universe, and I was determined to make up the difference.
“I’m your brother,” Paul said. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re my wife. Dad didn’t tell Mom about the programs he worked with, and I can’t tell you what I’m doing at Fort Meade.”
“At least tell me if the NSA is listening in on my phone calls.”
I gave him a look. “Nobody would want to listen to your phone calls. I doubt even Destiny wants to listen to them, but she doesn’t have much choice.”
It had been a month since Paul’s return to the United States, and he was doing fine. Better than fine, in fact. He seemed full of energy, enjoying life to the fullest, and had even started dating a girl named Destiny that he’d met at a local chess club. I had thought it would take longer for him to recover from his ordeal, but apparently what he had learned from the experience was the ability to appreciate the life that he had. It seemed a healthy reaction, and I was glad he was doing so well.
I used Paul’s Z to place the word blitz for thirty-two points, which brought me to within ten points of his lead. I gave him a smug smile, which vanished as he used my B to place babirusa, using all his letters again.
“What’s with you today?” I said. “Have you been studying the dictionary or something?”
He raised his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Maybe you’re just slipping. The NSA is scrambling your brain.”
“The NSA’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said, more a statement of faith than of certainty. I still barely knew what I was doing, and half the time I got lost trying to get back to my room from the cafeteria.
“Deciphered any messages yet?” he said.
I hadn’t, but as I placed the tiles for my next word, I said, “That’s classified.”
“At least tell me if there are any hot women secret agents.”
“Radioactive,” I told him. “They breed them in underground labs with an alien dark-energy generator they retrieved from outer space. The ones that don’t explode on contact they use as spies to seduce secrets from our enemies.”
“I thought that was the CIA,” he said.
“Common misconception. The CIA does it old school, with electrodes and a soldering iron.”
Paul suddenly winced and touched his temples.
“You okay?”
“Headache. Just the beginning of spring allergies, I think.”
“Do you need to lie down?” I never used to worry when my brother had a simple headache, but ever since his collapse at the airport, I had been quick to fear the worst.
“You wish,” he said, and placed the word quisling, tile by triumphant tile, across two triple word scores.
My humiliating trouncing at the Scrabble board was repeated the next day. In desperation, I suggested chess, usually Paul’s game of choice. That turned out even worse, with Paul chasing my pieces across the board with a series of brilliant moves, each of which gave me little choice but to cede him more control of the center of the board. Eventually, he skewered my queen and king with a combination I didn’t see coming, and I acknowledged myself beaten.