Multiverse a technothril.., p.18
Multiverse: A Technothriller, page 18
The only thing that tempered her excitement was the idea that Michael may never believe anything she said if he hadn’t received his memories from the future.
Would she have to kill him herself to stop what was coming?
Alicia had been sitting patiently at the conference room table for what seemed to be almost half an hour. She looked over at her father who’d closed his eyes, and she could tell from his deep breathing that he was meditating on something. She’d seen him do it countless times. He’d one time said that his technique of meditation felt almost like an out-of-body experience, and he usually used it when he needed to concentrate on a problem. She’d asked him to teach her how to do it before she went to college, since it seemed like might come in handy for her classes, but those lessons were one of the few he’d given her that hadn’t stuck.
Alicia had seen him sit and focus for an entire day without even so much as twitching a muscle. She had no idea what problem he was noodling on, but maybe it was as simple as a cheat for letting the time pass more quickly.
Just as her patience was waning, she heard a beep at the door and a slightly overweight man wearing glasses walked into the room carrying a laptop. Immediately behind him was Doug Mason.
Her father’s eyes opened and he said, “Brice, are we ready to start?”
Brice plugged his laptop into the electrical outlet on the center of the table, and then plugged another wire into his computer. “Let me share my screen, it’ll be easier that way.”
As a projector from the ceiling lowered into position, the forty-something year old leaned across the table and shook hands with Alicia. “Hi, I’m Marty Brice. You must be Alicia, that daughter I’ve heard so much about.”
“Brice is our chief technologist.” Mason said as the projector began beaming an image on the far wall of the conference room. He turned back to Brice and said, “Levi and Alicia need a quick intro into what I asked you to do before we dive in.”
“Right.” Brice sat down and pulled up a document on the computer.
Alicia focused on the image projected on the wall, it looked like a bunch of typed up notes.
“I was asked to gather as much intel as I could about a Princeton professor by the name of Michael Salomon. Setting aside his normal CV stuff about what colleges and papers he’s written, I focused more on the most recent stuff. Who was he acquainted with and who were they talking with, and about what.
“Let me go ahead and summarize what I learned. Our man is under FBI protection, but that protection is not on any of the official high side or low side e-mail traffic.”
Alicia raised her hand. “High side? Low side?”
Her father turned to her and said, “Think of the high side as the place where all the top secret type of stuff resides, and the low side is where you’d find more mundane things that aren’t necessarily a government secret.”
“Right.” Brice nodded. “Like I was saying, I searched on all of the internal networks, regardless of classification, and I found no orders of protection for the professor. However, I have surveillance footage that confirms he’s being accompanied by FBI agents practically twenty-four-seven, and they’ve sequestered him in a nearby hotel with several other members of his team.
“This is where things get murky. Whatever this guy is working on, it’s not on the system. I’ve managed to listen in on some conversations coming out of the DC area from the professor’s DARPA associates, and none of the stuff they talk about is ever written down anywhere I’ve been able to see. It’s very weird. Because you know that professor is generating some kind of e-mail or document traffic. My suspicion is that they are working on something that’s on an isolated network, and none of my spiders crawling the web have found entry points into their network. At least not yet. It may be that the network is completely cut off from all other internet traffic, and that means even the intelligence community’s network backbone. That’s possible, but I’ll say this, I’ve only once ever run into such a project, and it was having to do with a rogue intelligence agent who really knew what he was doing. He’d set up his own network and was manually migrating things from high side secure content to his own private network. If the people involved are doing that again, we’ll need someone with physical access to their network to figure out what these people are talking about.”
“Wouldn’t Michael have access to that network?” Alicia asked.
Brice nodded. “I’d expect so, and before anyone jumps the gun and starts talking about acquiring our professor, let’s peel the onion a bit.
“There were a couple of interesting tidbits I learned. Two main players are a SAC named Glen Bernstein.” Brice shifted his gaze to Alicia. “Sorry, an S-A-C, or SAC is a Special Agent in Charge. Basically a high-ranking FBI official. He’s evidently in charge of the professor’s physical security, but from what I can tell he mostly working through others. There’s another involved person named Jason Whitley, also an FBI agent. He’s interesting, in that Glen seems to use Jason as his eyes and ears when it comes to the professor.” Brice scrolled down the document until he reached what looked like a transcript of a conversation and pointed at the screen. “Here you can see an annotated transcript of a conversation I caught between those two.”
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “What do you mean there’s nothing in Professor Salomon’s bedroom closet? Our crew inventoried the entire house before closing it up, didn’t we?”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “Glen, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m standing in the middle of the man’s walk-in closet and there’s nothing here. I don’t have the original inventory list on me, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember a totally empty master bedroom closet coming up on the report. That stuff sort of stands out. And besides, this entire bedroom has been wiped clean. Someone definitely came in and emptied it.”
…
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “Are you freaking kidding me? Jason, this absolutely blows. We need that house re-inventoried, and compare it against what had been there. If someone’s taken stuff, I want to know where it is, and why. We might have control over the professor, but his damned wife and kid are still a problem. Do you think he's a flight risk?”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “We don’t think so. So far, he seems to be rather compliant.”
Alicia gasped. “Wife and kid? He has a wife and kid?” Noticing her father’s look at her outburst, she took a deep breath said in a calmer voice, “I didn’t think he had family at all.”
“He does.” Brice nodded. “But there’s a missing person’s report filed a couple months back.
How could she have not known? How could Michael have kept that from her? But if his wife and child were missing—and presumed dead—then after a decade, maybe his lack of candor made sense?
“Hold up,” Levi pointed at the screen and frowned. “First, why the hell does this professor even need protection? What triggered that? And I assume the FBI has this professor’s house under surveillance, and if someone took stuff out of that house, does that mean there’s someone else involved in this other than the FBI? Is that boogieman the reason the wife and kid are missing as well? Any suspicions on who that boogieman might be?”
Brice grinned. “All good questions. As to why he needs protection, I wasn’t able to dig up a solid answer, and that in and of itself is an answer. Any orders of protection go through channels, and it’s usually not the FBI that would do that, it would go through the US Marshalls service. The same path as witness protection might go. Either way, there’s places where I have access to that would register that data. I found nothing. So either they have a new place to register protection orders, which I doubt, or this is being done in some unofficial capacity.”
“Is that normal? An unofficial protection?” Alicia asked.
“Not in the least is it normal.” Brice said as he squinted at the screen. “So Levi, I don’t know why he’s being protected is the simple answer. I can guess that if the wife and child are missing, the FBI could have used that as a pretense to put him under protection. That, however is complete speculation on my part.
“I can say that the agents around the professor are legit agents of the FBI, so whoever is enabling this is someone higher up the food chain than this SAC I caught on the phone. As to who emptied the house, I have no idea. There’s no surveillance data on the house, and any trail I looked at came up empty. It might have been robbed, or there is a boogieman, and he’s gotten very lucky and managed to evade the FBI.”
“Or she’s gotten lucky.” Alicia grinned. “Women are quite capable of doing some of these things.”
Her father laughed and pointed in Brice’s direction. “Alicia, Brice knows very well what women are capable of. He’s married to that woman you thought had a cool call sign.”
“The Black Widow?” Alicia asked.
Brice’s face turned a bit pink as he nodded. “Nowadays she prefers the name, Annie.” He cleared his throat and scrolled to the next page of notes and more transcript. “This one mentions you, Alicia.”
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “Jason, what’s the story with this Alicia Yoder? Your guys were supposed to get her, so what gives?”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “Nothing good on that end. The girl hasn’t been seen in a couple days, and the folks I sent over… well, I don’t know. I’ve tried reaching out to them, but their phone must be off.”
“Those guys who tried to get me in the dorms were from the FBI?” Alicia asked, her eyes getting wider.
Brice nodded. “I’m afraid so. And this also confirms not only that we correctly ID’d them, but that this thing they have with you is absolutely off the books. I’ve scoured every government computer for information on those two clowns that they sent after you. No orders for them to go anywhere near New Jersey, much less get custody of a student. They were both out of the Arlington, Virginia area.”
Alicia noticed her father staring at the screen, his jaw muscles bunched up, but he remained silent. He was fuming. She’d never seen her father outwardly angry in her life, but she could imagine what it might be like. A cold and calculated fury. When she was still on the streets as a little girl, before her father came into her life, she’d dreamt of killing the men and women who’d taken advantage of her. At the time, she was too small to have acted on those desires.
She imagined that, like her father, she was capable of great destruction when properly motivated.
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “Damn it all to hell, why can’t I catch any kind of break? We’ve got a direct connection now between our professor and this Alicia chick. Somehow they know of each other and he tried calling her.”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “Listen Glen, we’ve been watching him like a hawk. I have no idea how she might have gotten her hooks into him.”
“He tried calling me?” Alicia stared at the screen. “Oh, my old number. I made him take a picture of my contact screen. He probably tried to call my old cell phone which I dumped back at school when you guys gave me the new one.”
Her father leaned back in his chair. “The FBI is definitely monitoring our professor’s communications. I didn’t think you could do that without a warrant.” He looked in Brice’s direction. “Any warrants?”
Brice shook his head. “Nothing I could find. The whole thing stinks. This isn’t the way things are ever done.”
Alicia looked over at Mason and they both smirked. Both of them knew that in the future, this was the only way things were done. There was no privacy, not even for your own thoughts.
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “Fine, keep trying to find that girl. We need her under our control and out of the way. I think I have an almost air-tight case for accelerating the move to DC—”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “Glen, you might want to double check that plan. I have direct from the horse’s mouth that says our guy won’t go to DC.”
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “Why? What the hell’s his problem with DC?”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “He’s still holding out hope for his wife and kid reappearing.”
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “I see. Well, maybe I’ll have to break the news to him.”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “What news?”
[SAC Glen Bernstein] “Never mind, I’ll handle it.”
“‘I’ll have to break the news to him’ What the hell does that mean?” Levi asked. “Is there any data on his wife and kid?”
Brice shook his head. “Those two have become ghosts. I don’t know what happened, or what he meant by that. But there is something interesting about this Agent Whitley. The guy clearly stated that he has direct interaction with the professor. I pulled up Whitley’s file and since I have some voice prints, I verified that someone who looks a lot like the agent was seen coming and going from Jadwin Hall on the Princeton campus.
“That same agent is also listed as a grad student at Princeton University under the name Joshua Whitley. The same Joshua Whitley who a handful of months ago got himself assigned as a grad student assistant to none other than Professor Michael Salomon. I’ll note that he was embedded with the professor before the birth of his only child, so it was certainly ahead of any of the possible missing persons events. These guys have had their eyes on the professor for a while. In fact, I did some digging and I think this Josh guy ended being what brought the DARPA guys into this project. Even though the transcript statement of the person talking claims to be someone named Ken Lee, it turns out the voice print I listened to matched that of Agent Whitley.”
[DARPA - Dr. Carl Sundenbach] “Ken, are you sure about this?”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “I’m one-hundred percent sure. We have managed to detect tachyon particles in our vacuum chamber by their Cherenkov radiation. I figured you’re the person who should know. I think if you reach out to the Professor Salomon at Princeton, he’d be amenable to working with the US government on furthering the research.”
[DARPA - Dr. Carl Sundenbach] “And you are who, again?”
[AGT Jason Whitley] “Ken Lee, I’m a post-grad researcher on Professor Salomon’s team.
[DARPA - Dr. Carl Sundenbach] “Well, I will be sure to take this up with some others and you might be hearing from us. Thanks for the call.”
“I’d also add,” Brice said, “that I looked up Ken Lee to find any association with the professor and it turned out he was a post-grad researcher working for Professor Salomon. He’d died in a car crash sometime in the last couple months.”
“People keep disappearing and dying around this professor.” Mason noted. “I’m sure our professor would just love to hear that he has FBI spies among his engineers.” Mason noted. “What do we know about the professor’s whereabouts and protection.” He shifted his gaze to Levi. “And based on what we know, what are we dealing with if we wanted to get an extraction team going?”
Alicia looked back and forth between her father and Brice. An extraction team sounded like a military operation. Was that something her father actually did?
“I’d say we have a pretty easy route if we don’t mind friendly fire on the FBI. He’s best protected coming to and from his work. Full police escort, leading and trailing cars, as well as a contingent of FBI agents in his vehicle. I’d say his time at the hotel might be the least protected, because from what I can see, there are routes where you’d only have to deal with a handful of agents in a stealth extraction. But there’s a problem and maybe an opportunity. Just a little bit before this meeting, our professor had a flight to DC confirmed for the day after tomorrow. Even though I see nothing official, you’d have to imagine there’s an armed escort involved.”
Alicia’s father leaned forward in his chair and focused on Brice. “Can you have eyes on him at the airport when he lands?”
Brice nodded.
“I suppose it depends on who’s accompanying him, we have to presume the worst and say he’s got FBI or US Marshals as an escort, but maybe he won’t. I can probably shadow him as long as you’re my overwatch. I need eyes in the sky so I can see what’s going on as things unfold.”
Alicia looked over at her father, but Mason shook his head. “Alicia, before you even ask, it’s my responsibility to keep you safe. We don’t know the extent of the government’s interest in you, so we have to assume everyone’s got a little picture of you and is waiting for you to pop up somewhere.”
“Wait a minute,” Levi said with grin.
Alicia was staring at her father when their eyes met, and she could almost hear his thoughts as they shared a father-daughter connection. He understood her better than anyone ever had. She was doing everything in her power not to be unreasonable, but she really wanted to get involved in getting Michael out of his situation.
Her father winked at her and shifted his gaze back to the other two men. “Mason, I’ll have a list of a couple people I’d like on an extraction team. I don’t know if we’ll use them, but I’ll need them at the ready.”
The director pursed his lips for a second before nodding. “I can do that. Just send me the list of who you need.”
Levi pointed at Brice. “Obviously if you manage to hear anything about itineraries or anything that implies where he’s going in the area before he gets here, I’ll want to know. But as long as you’re in my ear feeding me decent intel, then we’ll see what can be done. I have an idea or two and I’ll keep Alicia out of harm’s way.” He turned to Alicia and said, “Are you ready to see what I really do for a living?”
Alicia nodded, and it took every ounce of her will-power not to clap excitedly like a little girl at the prospect of watching her father in action… and maybe even helping out in some small way.
