The Trojan Horse

Chapter Eight

Fort Meade, Maryland

USA, Day 17

“If you’ll follow me, sir…?”

Toby followed the NSA staffer with some irritation. The call to Fort Meade — the headquarters of the National Security Agency, responsible for intercepting enemy messages and protecting American communications security — had come out of the blue. It was true that he was overdue for a routine security check and lecture, but his life had been really quite alarmingly busy. Unlike many of the government staffers, Toby didn’t hold security in absolute contempt, yet it could be irritating at times. He was cleared for almost everything, after all.

He’d expected a pleasant office, like the ones that had been used on his prior visits. Instead, he found himself led down a long corridor and into a sealed examination room. He was still puzzling over this when the staffer vanished out of the door and the room sealed behind him with an audible thump. A moment later, a stern voice came out of nowhere.

“Remove all clothing and personal possessions,” it ordered.

Toby bit down the comment that came to mind and slowly undressed. Coming from a large family, he had few taboos about being naked in front of strangers — and besides, he could be reasonably sure that the NSA would only have male officers peering at him. The thought wasn’t much reassurance as he removed his pants and boxers, dumping them all into the marked tray at one side of the room. They would be held in storage for him once he returned from the bowels of Fort Meade, he assumed. There was no way that they could charge him with anything, for the very simple reason that he hadn’t done anything. It still made him feel slightly guilty.

A door hissed open at the other end of the room. “Proceed through the door and lie down on the table,” the voice ordered. “Lie on your back.”

The cold air wafting through the doorway didn’t help Toby’s nerves. Unexplained security procedures were always bad news. “What are you going to do?” He asked, as he entered the second room. It looked like a medical examination chamber, although it was surprisingly bare, with only a small set of equipment in one corner. “Stick fingers up my butt to prove that I’m not hiding anything there?”

The voice, not surprisingly, failed to rise to the bait. Instead, a man wearing a protective suit appeared out of yet another door, his face hidden behind a mirrored surface on his mask. Toby braced himself as the man pressed what looked like an oversized hypodermic needle against his shoulder, expecting to feel the needle entering his skin. Instead, there was a brief sucking sensation and then the masked man stepped back, apparently satisfied. He slipped out of the door before Toby could sit up, the doorway closing and vanishing amidst the room’s white-painted walls. Toby knew the door was there and yet he couldn’t pick it out from the wall.

A third door opened at the far end. “Proceed through the doorway and dress yourself,” the voice ordered. “You will be met once you have cleared the sterile environment.”

Toby scowled, but did as he was told. A small pile of clothing awaited him; a simple military-style tunic, with a pair of underpants. There was nothing else; his original set of clothes would have to wait until he left the building. When he had finished dressing, a final door hissed open, revealing a small waiting room. Four people stood there, waiting for him. Toby was surprised to realise that he recognised three of them; the fourth was a complete stranger. But in hindsight, it should have been obvious. Someone was clearly taking security very seriously.

Director Nimitz of the National Security Agency was a tall thin man, with a pale face and sallow features that had led some of his subordinates to whisper that he was a vampire. He was renowned for having no sense of humour, but then he’d reached his present post as the result of a complete failure in intelligence that had cost his predecessor his career. The NSA was the most secretive of government agencies and the thought of actually revealing their — much-hyped — capabilities to the great unwashed, which included every other intelligence agency in the world, was anthemia to its officers.

Toby spared a smile for the person standing next to him. Gillian Baskin was a blonde woman with an unbelievably perky smile, which concealed the sharpest mind Toby had ever encountered. They’d been pushed together when the President had ordered Toby to handle liaison with the intelligence communities — something he found uncomfortable — and Gillian had been assigned to brief him. Toby had asked her out to dinner a couple of times, but their relationship had remained strictly professional. He couldn’t really blame her. The operatives who served in her position couldn’t risk even the slightest hint that they might have been compromised.

The CIA Director opened the meeting, once they’d walked into a small conference room and been served cups of steaming coffee. “Mr Sanderson, this is Sir Charles Hanover, the Deputy Director of MI5,” he said. “I’m sorry for the cloak and dagger routine, but we needed to talk under strict security. We may have a serious problem on our hands.”

Toby nodded, taking a sip of his coffee. There were few places that could be deemed absolutely secure — particularly to TEMPEST standards — but Fort Meade’s underground complex was one of them. So were the White House Situation Room and a number of other facilities, some of them so heavily classified that Toby was barely even aware of their existence. The experts in the NSA had staked their reputations that the complexes — and their computer systems, light years ahead of computers in the public sector — were absolutely secure. It was impossible to signal out of a secure room — and any attempt to do so would be detected.

“Over the past three days, our counter-surveillance systems” — he didn’t go into details; some of them were so highly classified that even the President had no need to know — “picked up a number of disturbing transmissions from Washington. Gillian?”

Gillian’s cool voice echoed in the silent room. “I’ll spare you the technical details,” she said. “Suffice it to say that the transmissions were focused on a very high frequency and ultra-compressed; each transmission lasted little longer than a microsecond. Our first assumption was that we had stumbled over a nest of foreign spies within the capital and started attempting to track them down, while analysing their signal transmissions in the hope of understanding how it was done. It didn’t take more than a few hours to determine that the transmissions were utterly impossible to crack.”

Toby sucked in his breath sharply. The NSA had dropped most of its objections to commercially-owned encryption programs, secure in the knowledge that most of them could be decrypted by the NSA, even without a copy of the secure key used to encode the message before it was sent. Everyone knew that the NSA intercepted transmissions from all over the world, cracking Russian, Chinese and even European encryption schemes and giving the American intelligence community unprecedented access into the minds of their potential opponents. The network of quantum computers held in Fort Meade could decrypt anything, if only through brute force decryption. No one on Earth possessed more advanced computers than the NSA.

His blood ran cold. On Earth…

Gillian nodded, following his train of thought. “It was surprisingly easy to locate the sources of the transmissions,” she said. She tapped a control pad hidden on her side of the table and a slide appeared on the wall. Toby frowned. It was a pinkish background, with a tiny silver object on top of it. The detail seemed almost blurred.

“That is pretty much the maximum magnification we can give it,” Gillian added. “We removed that device from your arm.”

Toby looked down, remembering the oversized needle that had been pressed against his skin. There hadn’t been anything there, had there? But then, diseases and germs were too small for the human eye to see… and they could be lethal. He hadn’t had the slightest idea that anything was there.

“I see,” he said, as calmly as he could. Inwardly, he was reeling. “How big is it?”

“Just a hair or two above true nanotechnology-size,” Gillian said. “I don’t think I have to explain just how dangerous this could be.”

No, Toby knew; she didn’t have to explain. If the devices — the bugs — were so tiny, they could be taken anywhere by the unwitting host, turning loyal Americans into unknowing traitors. How long had it been on his arm? Toby was cleared for everything, a silent observer of secure briefings covering everything from defence to the ongoing economic crisis. He was loyal and yet he’d betrayed his country. And if there had been a bug on his arm, how many others were carrying their own unwanted guest?

“The transmissions,” Toby said, finally. “What did they say?”

“We don’t know,” Gillian said. “The real problem is simple. They cannot have come from Earth.”

“The Galactics,” Toby said. The conclusion was inescapable. So were the implications. “They’re spying on us.”

“So it would seem,” Hanover said. The Englishman leaned forward. “MI5 has been tracking a worrying series of meetings between the Galactics and people from… shall we say vested political interests? As far as we can tell, the Galactic bases in the EU have been seeing the same curious pattern of behaviour. There’s good reason to suspect that they’ve been holding such meetings in Russia and China as well.”

He sighed, deeply. “Who are they meeting? Political leaders — often those with the least stake in the establishment; businessmen with interests that may be harmed or helped by alien technology; media editors and newspaper men… and what are they saying in those meetings? We don’t know.”

Toby scowled. “You don’t do follow-up debriefs afterwards?”

“Not everyone is willing to talk,” the CIA Director admitted. “We cannot force American citizens to disclose details of confidential discussions — it hasn’t been that long since the Cancer Drug scandal. But connected with these alien… bugs, it poses a worrying question — what are the Galactics truly playing at? What do they really want?”

Toby remembered the brief moment he’d locked eyes with one of the aliens and shivered, feeling cold. “Another question,” he said. “How many of these bugs are there?”

Gillian shook her head, slowly. “It’s impossible to tell,” she said. “They’re very hard to detect — we only knew you’d been bugged because the device was transmitting at the wrong moment, when it was too close to one of the sensor stations we positioned throughout the White House. If we assume that each of the transmissions we’ve picked up comes from a separate bug, we could be looking at upwards of five hundred devices within Washington alone. The real number could be much higher.”

His father had often lectured Toby on the value of good intelligence. Given a series of nearly undetectable bugs, the Galactics could snoop into almost anywhere they wanted to go. Their long list of guests at one of their bases was a cross-section of American society, the movers and shakers who made America work. The Galactics would know everything the American Government knew before too long. And then — what would they do with the information?

“We carried out a set of checks on government databases as well,” Gillian added, dourly. “There’s always been a hacking threat from China and other rogue states — and our own stable of hacking anarchists who think that information should be free. There is some real proof that a number of secure government databases have been hacked, but we have been unable to track down the perpetrators. In several cases, the FBI thought they’d finally gained evidence to convict known hackers, but they always had alibis.”

“One attack came out of England,” Hanover added. “We checked it out and found… we found a woman who barely knew anything about computers. She couldn’t have hacked into her own computer, let alone the most sophisticated computer security system in the world.”

“Someone hacked into her computer and turned it into a remote platform for further hacking,” Gillian said. “It’s not an uncommon hacking pattern, but this one seems to stop dead at her computer. The level of technological sophistication in these attacks is light years ahead of anything we’ve got, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Apart from the Galactics,” Toby said, bitterly. He looked up as a thought struck him. “Did they stick a bug on the President?”

Gillian’s blue eyes seemed to refuse to meet Toby’s brown eyes. “We don’t know,” she admitted. “We can only really detect the bugs when they’re transmitting, unless we put someone through a full security check. And even then it’s patchy. If we hadn’t known that you were bugged…”

Toby could complete the sentence for himself. “I would have walked out of this meeting and the aliens would have known at once,” he said. The thought refused to fade from his mind. “Do they know we know?”

“We don’t know,” Gillian said, when her superior seemed disinclined to answer the question. “Their hacking attacks weren’t completely subtle; their bugs may have been removed naturally…”

“I think we have to assume that they do know that we found the bugs,” the CIA Director said. “It would be too much of a coincidence to lose a bug on one of the few people with direct access to the President.”

Toby swallowed hard. “But what do they want?”

Despite himself, it came out as an almost plaintive cry. His throat felt dry; his palms were sweaty. He’d been there when the President had been briefed on the nuclear weapons at his command, the weapons that could wipe out a good percentage of the planet and contaminate the rest for thousands of years. The President had been shocked, but Toby hadn’t understood — until now. There were things so big as to be almost impossible to grasp until they slammed into one’s head.

“We don’t know,” the CIA Director said. “One; they mean everything they said to us and they’re monitoring us to ensure that they know what we’re doing with their gifts. Two; they’re hostile and they want to monitor us to ensure that we don’t catch on to what they’re doing before it is too late.”

Toby shuddered. “They’re spying on us, covertly,” he said. “That doesn’t suggest friendly intent.”

“It would seem so,” the CIA Director agreed. “At the very least, they don’t trust us — we’re naked before them, almost defenceless, and they’re still spying on us.”

The thought was almost impossible to grasp, despite his fears over the true intentions of the Galactic Federation. But then — the aliens had been very careful in what they’d said to the human race. Very little of it was actually useful and they’d presented almost no technological data. The fusion plants they’d provided for the United States were sealed units, with human scientists barred from studying them. A handful of other gadgets had yielded little more information.

On one hand, it was easy to understand a certain caution in dealing with the human race. The Galactics had pointed out many issues that suggested a certain insanity surrounding the human race, everything from fouling the environment to cheerfully committing mass murder and even genocide over trifling issues such as religion. Who knew how the human race would behave if given access to the stars? Even a society that had renounced war might be concerned by the possibility.

But, on the other hand, there was a sense of… shiftiness surrounding the Galactics and how they dealt with the human race. They had been careful to withhold details, even details that could be of no conceivable military use, from their human questioners. No one even knew how many of them there were, or…

“All right,” he said. “What do we do about it?”

“That is the question,” the CIA Director said. “Can we take this to the President?”

The NSA Director had a different question. “Do we dare take it to the President?”

Toby opened his mouth to argue, and then saw his point. There might be other bugs within the White House, ones that might be lying dormant, recording everything they heard before transmitting it up to the alien starships. If Toby — having lost his bug — sought a private meeting with the President, any other bugs would certainly be ordered to listen in to the conversation… who knew just what the aliens were capable of doing?

And the President, the most powerful man on Earth, would certainly be a target for alien surveillance…

“We can’t,” he said, bitterly. The unanswered questions made it difficult, almost impossible, to think of a viable counter-strategy. And even if they did… there were still seventeen starships in orbit around the Earth. The Galactics — if they came with hostile intentions — could certainly bombard the planet back to the Stone Age. But given their technology, what could they possibly want with Earth in the first place? All the reasons human nations had attacked other nations were meaningless to the Galactics. If they were so scared of competition, why hadn’t they simply nudged an asteroid or two in towards Earth?

Slowly, very tentatively, an idea began to form in his mind.

The intercom buzzed before he could start outlining his plan. “Director,” a female voice said, “Mr Sanderson has been summoned back to the White House.”

Toby felt his heartbeat start to speed up. The moment he stepped out of the secure building, the aliens would know that he was no longer under surveillance. And then… what would they do? His family’s dead heroes might have been calm in the face of danger, but they’d understood the dangers of Japanese kamikazes and German Panzers. Toby found it impossible to come to grips with the alien threat — if indeed it even was a threat.

“I’ll be on my way,” he said. His voice sounded weak, even to his ears. “Did they say why?”

“The aliens have completed their negotiations,” the female voice said. “They are prepared to tell us what we need to do to join the Galactic Federation.”

Toby looked over at Gillian, who looked just as nervous as Toby felt. “It’s starting,” he said. But what was it? “Pray for us.”