Lockout

CHAPTER ONE

Three Years Later

National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, Maryland (9:05 a.m. EST / 1405 Zulu)

Jenny Reynolds sighed and let her mind refocus as she forced herself to stop tapping out a desktop drum solo with her pencil. Two hours trying to unravel a mystery message had passed her personal breaking point.

Jenny shook her head in a gesture no one noticed and forced herself to disconnect from the puzzle. An hour ago she’d yanked off her iPod headset to concentrate, but the challenge of an uncracked code would not stop chewing on her. Why had a simple unidentified satellite burst managed to offend her so profoundly?

NSA’s satellites and computers picked up endless bursts every hour that she couldn’t translate, at least at first—transmissions with no known syntax, no known purpose, and no recognized source. Of course, there were also sophisticated communication “gamers” all over the planet who loved to stick a finger in the NSA’s eye from time to time with sequences which were exactly what they appeared to be: garbage. Gobbledygook uplinked just to worry Washington and give Ivan, Ahmed, or Chan a good laugh, especially since that scumbag Snowden defected.

But this transmission was different somehow. Not a game. Wrong point of origin, wrong frequency, wrong everything. It was there, just out of reach, teasing her to recognize something in the encoding.

And, there was that other disturbing reality: People didn’t waste time encoding messages hidden in frequency harmonics and piggybacked on routine transmissions unless there was a very specific purpose to be served.

I’m trying to be the perfectionist again! she thought, well aware that her penchant for being perfect tended to irritate her geeky coworkers—as did the fact that she liked to dress well. “Learn to call for help every now and then,” she’d been told in her recent job review. It was a slap in the face that still stung.

Jenny slipped her feet back into the black pumps that gave her a fighting chance of seeming taller than her petite five feet, and she force-marched herself through the labyrinth of cubicles to her boss’s corner office.

As usual, Seth Zieglar’s lanky six-foot frame was pretzeled nose-down in his computer, yet he was acutely aware of the skirt leaning into his doorway.

“You clattered?” he asked without looking up.

“Sorry?”

“Your stilettos,” he explained, looking over and smiling. “They’re like your signature. Along with your Georgia accent, that is.”

“They’re called pumps, Seth.”

He pulled off his glasses, his voice characteristically laconic as his eyes took in her black skirt and tailored, slightly frilly white blouse. “Whatever they are, may I say without fear of receiving sexual harassment charges, that they become you?”

“As long as you don’t call them FM boots again. That wasn’t even subtle.”

“Never! I’ve been appropriately reeducated. Although… now that you’ve once again voluntarily instilled the image of hooker boots in my head…”

“Seth!”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry!”

“I’ve got a problem.” She laid her notes on his desk and sat down beside him. “You said I should call for help, so… ‘Help!’”

“Sweet! See? Wasn’t that hard, was it?” He pointed dramatically at her face. “I especially liked the tentative curl of your lower lip.”

“Jeez, Seth!”

“Okay… all seriousness aside, what’s up?”

She sat down beside him. “The computers snagged this burst transmission about three hours ago. The thing was trying to ride undetected on a routine satellite uplink from the UK. The source, however, I think is somewhere off the Irish coast, and while there’s one US Navy ship splashing around in the area, this isn’t a syntax the navy ever uses. Frankly, I don’t know what the heck it is.”

“Well… any guesses?”

She sighed, another sign of defeat she hated. “It’s… probably a programming order of some sort. It’s asking another computer to do something. Closest thing in my experience would be the multiple-repeat commands we learned to send from the Jet Propulsion Lab in California to distant spacecraft. You know, ‘Hey there, V-Jer, turn your antenna towards this, fire your rockets at that, and give us a precise readback.’ Orders we wanted to absolutely make sure got through without error.”

“But what’s the urgency, Jen? What’s worrying you?”

“Dude, what’s it programming? That’s what’s bothering me.”

“Okay,” he said, stroking his bony chin.

“I mean, is this a targeting order for a remotely piloted vehicle, like a Global Hawk or a Predator? Is it a test? A… a programming order for a spacecraft that the owner of the satellite doesn’t want seen?”

“You’ve run all the usual…”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, unconsciously running a hand through her mane of perpetually curly chestnut hair. “I jammed it through the main supercomputers, and they can’t match it.”

Seth leaned forward, studying her. “You’ve got a hunch though, don’t you?”

“No… not a hunch, really. Just a worry.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, just that… if something sophisticated and in motion is being programmed, we need to know what it is and where it’s headed or pointed. I mean, taking into account everyone in the world who wants to harm us and the fact that the only countries on the planet who remain our friends are Monaco and McMurdo Sound in Antarctica…”

“McMurdo is not a country, Jen.”

“My point exactly. Anyway, it makes me real nervous to have what feels like a targeting sequence being sent to an unseen, unknown receiver.”

“Was there a latitude or longitude in the message?”

“Maybe. There are numbers.”

He nodded. “Okay, then pull our esteemed friends at the North American Air Defense Command into this, and if they act puzzled, light up Defense Intelligence.”

“Whoa, Seth! I’m worried, not professionally suicidal. You want DIA pulled in on nothing more than a wild suspicion of mine?”

“We at least need to know if this is one of ours, right?”

“You think it could be a US military thing? Like a black project?”

“They don’t tell us, Jen. That’s why they call them black projects.”

“Would they tell us if we asked real nice?” she countered, tilting her head.

“Not directly, but something would be said. Or someone very authoritative with dark glasses and a black suit would be sent over to make us calm down. And, by the by, just because the navy hasn’t used a particular code pattern doesn’t mean they couldn’t be doing so for the first time.”

“You are kidding about that, right?”

“About what? The navy?”

“The strange guys with dark glasses and black suits?”

He looked at her for a few seconds and smiled. “Maybe.”

“That scares me, Seth, and I think you know it. I’m not in covert ops.”

“None of us is. That’s why men in black scare us.”

“Okay, stop it. Seriously? Please. I don’t want to know about that stuff.”

“Remember, Jen,” he chuckled, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!”

Jenny shook her head in mock disgust and rolled her eyes. “Why do you like torturing women, Seth?”

“I don’t! At least, not women in general. Mostly I just like torturing you,” he grinned.

“As I always suspected.”

“Seriously, Jen, they’ll let us know if it’s out of our bailiwick. Don’t worry.”

She sat in thought for a few moments. “I checked on airborne traffic, including drones passing through the area that might have birthed the transmission.”

“And?”

“Nothing out there but regularly scheduled commercial flights, and none of them could use a transmission like this.”

Seth was sitting quietly, waiting.

“Am I… missing something?” Jenny asked.

“Now that, my resident perfectionist genius, is the real question. And if we figure it out, we’ll probably discover it’s just some idiot in Iowa programming his toy helicopter.”

“But, if we get this wrong…”

Seth sighed openly, a weary look crossing his angular features as his thoughts focused inward for a second. “Well… if we get it wrong and something really skanky happens… like another 9/11… nobody will ever love us again. Ever. Not even our mothers.”

“Jeez, Seth.”

“Welcome to life on the edge, Miss Reynolds.”

She got to her feet and paused at the door, looking back.

“And for the record, y’all? I don’t have an accent.”