“Nice work, Jeff. So how long before all of that is operational for them?”
“I’ll bet we’ll know before our counterparts in the Kremlin.”
She thanked Jeff, expecting him to leave. Instead he sat in the office’s guest chair.
“There’s something else you should know.”
His tone set off alarm bells for Lana. “What is it?”
“We had a double murder in Cambridge Friday night. Our friends at the FBI have been busy all weekend because the presumed target was a Dr. Brian Ahearn, who worked in Harvard’s Computer Science Department. I should also note that the murders have our colleagues at the Strategic Studies Institute sniffing the air.”
“What’s SSI’s interest?”
“Apparently, Ahearn was working on a means of extracting carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.”
Lana swiveled to her keyboard and immediately created a new file. “You’re right,” she told Jeff, “I should know this.” And she would have learned it, sooner than later, being a member of a new, top secret task force examining the international security concerns facing the U.S. because of climate change. “What do we know so far?”
“More than Harvard does, that’s for sure. They’re just getting clued in now. They didn’t know anything about his research.”
“How do we know about it then?”
“The FBI had an asset who had lunch with him every Wednesday. A math professor at MIT. I guess they shared a taste for hamburgers, and Professor Ahearn’s wife didn’t approve of his eating meat. The mathematician’s wife didn’t care, but he pretended to be under similar constraints at home as a means of bonding.”
“Over burgers?” Lana asked.
“I know, mind-boggling, but there you go. During one of their secret forays to a joint in Harvard Square — this was about two years ago — Ahearn casually alluded to his research. Nothing so precise as ‘I’m working on Ambient Air Capture at home,’ but enough to have piqued the interest of the mathematician and his minders, who promptly supplied him with an eight-gig fob camera.”
“How did he manage to get photos of anything more than the burgers?”
“People do have to go to the bathroom,” Jensen said. “And Ahearn was a creature of habit. He always used the facilities as soon as they were seated in one of the booths, and our mathematician photographed everything he could from the man’s briefcase in the two minutes and forty seconds that Ahearn typically used to complete the trip.”
“The computer science professor left his briefcase unlocked?” Lana sat back. “That’s hard to believe.”
“No, never, it was always locked. But it was a combination lock, and they hacked the code from the briefcase manufacturer.”
“Did NSA do that?”
“I’m sure Ed could tell you.”
Snowden. His name came up in this sort of context all the time, not always bitterly.
“Most of the time the math professor found nothing,” Jensen explained. “But on four occasions he photographed notes and mathematical formulas that included algorithms applicable to AAC.”
“Did Ahearn actually advance the science?” she asked.
“Considerably. The last batch of photos showed him on the verge of nearing his goal, from the reports I’ve received. That was two months ago. If he actually pulled it off, it would have been a world changer.”
“But no final answers, I presume, for the key-fob cameraman or us?”
“None.” Jensen shook his head.
“Who was the other victim? You said it was a double murder.”
“His wife was killed, too, and that was bad. Her ring finger was hacked off before she was shot in the face. And their four-year-old twins were found bound in their bedroom, one still gagged. She reported that black men had been in the house. The other was just as insistent the men were dressed in black. The only thing they agree on is that the men wore black ski masks. The Bureau’s forensic team has found black threads that do not match other fabrics in the house, so we think they could have been men dressed in black. A caller alerted 911 to the murders. Agents were not able to trace the call and presumed a prepaid cell had been used. Whoever did make the call spared the twins having to wait for hours for their nanny to return to the house.”
“Has she been questioned?” Lana asked.
“At great length. She’s from Costa Rica, a part-time student at Boston University. Speaks excellent English. She’s not a suspect, just a person of interest.”
Lana nodded again.
“The other interesting thing about this,” Jeff continued, “is that the killers took a pizza out of the oven and helped themselves to it. No trace of it was found in the victims’ stomachs, and forensics found the kind of crumbs you’d expect from people casually lounging around eating. The Bureau thinks it was the killers’ way of saying, ‘Hey, we’re professionals. Good luck finding us.’”
“Well, the chopped finger makes sense from an intimidation point of view,” Lana said. “It showed they meant business from the get-go.”
“That’s been leading the coverage in Beantown, but what didn’t get leaked was that his hard drive was taken from his computer and his safe was left open. Agents say some of his colleagues think he might have had an external drive in there. Not unusual in their field, I guess. The Bureau has an Evidence Response Team, ERT, processing the entire crime scene now, including the safe.”
“Did anything get out about AAC?”
“Not exactly, but there were reports, mostly on the Web, that the professor was involved in some rarefied research, but not the exact subject matter.” Jeff started to get up, then sat back down. “One other thing. The Bureau thinks the professor might have built something in his home office, maybe the prototype. He was not a do-it-yourselfer, but they found specialized tools and instruments. Nothing definite, but the Bureau has a unit processing his work area as well. A visual observation alone suggests something else is missing.”
With that, Jensen made his exit and Lana turned to the icebreakers and cable-laying ship on one of her screens, hulls and decks gray as those great northern waters. She was giving herself the freedom to simply think about the goings-on in the Arctic, how fraught such a frigid region had become, when Holmes directed her to join an urgent secure video teleconference, SCVT, with him and the chief of Naval Operations, along with two of the admiral’s top-ranking Pentagon aides.
This can’t be about those ships, she told herself, not with Admiral Roger Deming on-screen. She was right. The concerns were much deeper and closer to home: The U.S.S. Delphin, a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine, had been taken over thirteen minutes ago.
By hackers!
Admiral Deming leaned forward to talk, an old warrior’s phantom-limb response to an absent microphone. “We didn’t believe it was even possible for an enemy to do this. They must have some help onboard. A sub cannot be taken control of remotely.”
“Is there any communication with the command staff?” Lana asked.
“None,” Deming replied. “All contact is shut down. And they’ve got twenty-four Trident IIs, most with multiple warheads.”
“So how is this even possible?” Lana asked.
“That,” Holmes replied, “is what we need to find out.”
Lana’s video hookup showed not only her counterparts in Washington, but also the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina. A crosshair indicated the sub’s location.
Holmes, white hair combed straight back — looking exactly the same as when she had first met him more than fifteen years ago — said the sub was the nation’s highest priority. “The President has been alerted and command posts worldwide are fully activated. We have destroyers on their way down there.”