The Identity Mine

XLI

‘Lopez.’

Nicola Lopez answered her cell on the second ring as she lingered on the south lawn and watched hundreds of dignitaries waited patiently for the President, the First Lady and the President of the People’s Republic of China to emerge from the White House.

‘It’s me,’ Ethan said, sounding as though he was in the middle of a hurricane.

‘What’s happening?’

‘It’s the cell phones!’ Ethan yelled. ‘They’re using the cell phones to relay their signals! They must have a booster somewhere, somebody acting to get the signal through the electromagnetic shielding around the White House!’

Lopez covered one ear as she struggled to hear Ethan above a sudden rapturous applause as the guests on the White House lawn stood, the President of the United States emerging from the White House with his wife and the Chinese President beside him.

‘Do we have a suspect or a target?’

Ethan shouted from the other end of the line.

‘The Chinese are involved, possibly intending to target the President himself but I can’t be sure! There’s got to be somebody in the crowd who’s helping them! Mitchell was here… took the hard drive… could be there….’

‘Ethan you’re breaking up!’ Lopez gasped. ‘Do we have a target?!’

‘… likely to be… who’s helping them… apprehend them now…’

The line went dead in Lopez’s ear and she cursed as she shoved the cell back into her pocket and scanned the crowd. With them all standing and clapping, she figured that nobody would be able to fiddle with their cell phones. Maybe they wouldn’t have to do anything at all, just keep them switched on and let the Chinese hack their way into an unwitting assassin’s mind and unleash hell across the South Lawn.

The only people carrying weapons were the Secret Service and Lopez, and with a sudden start she realized that she could have been implanted. Her weariness clouded her thinking, made her question herself and for a moment she was lost in a delirium of silence, her eyes focusing on nothing and her legs feeling numb as she swayed on the spot. The applause before her died down and a blissful silence enveloped her as she literally began to sleep on her feet.

‘Lopez.’

She jerked awake and looked to her right as a Secret Service Agent peered at her. ‘You done napping?’

Lopez nodded, both ashamed and angry at herself as she focused on the gathering before her. She watched as the two Presidents, accompanied by their wives, walked down onto the lawns and a plethora of dignitaries moved forward to greet them.

Lopez scanned the crowds but she could see nothing that suggested an assassin was preparing an attack. Ethan had mentioned Mitchell and that he had grabbed a hard drive of some kind. Presumably the Chinese had been involved and perhaps that hard drive had contained the data necessary to control the assassin, whoever they may be.

Lopez’s microphone hissed and she heard Jarvis’s voice on the line.

‘Lopez, we’ve got a plan. We’ve got a feed here from the Chinese computers we captured, and we’re trying to hack into it now and figure out who has been implanted at the ceremony. It turns out they were watching through the eyes of whoever Abrahem Nassir managed to implant in Iraq, but they couldn’t figure out who it was. You need to get to the Horsepower bunker and relay the feed through from us here at the DIA.’

‘You can see what they see?’

‘If we can hack the signal,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The Chinese were using a modulating frequency to hide their activities and they don’t have a way of deactivating it after the computers were damaged in the crash — it’s all part of their state’s efforts to prevent their exposure here in the United States. If the computers were shut down their signals were scrambled and erased. Hellerman’s working on a code to reactivate the signals based on the original modulation but it’s taking time. You need to be ready.’

Lopez looked at the Secret Service Agent alongside her, who nodded once as he heard the same transmission.

‘I’ll take you down there but we only have a few minutes. The ceremony’s begun and if they’re going to make a move, it’s going to be real damned soon!’

‘Get on it, Nicola,’ Jarvis urged. ‘This is the only way to stop the attack without causing a major international incident!’

‘Hurry it up!’

Doug Jarvis followed Hellerman like a ghostly shadow as he hurried into the National Security Agency’s Identity Mine Watch Room and rushed toward a vacant seat among the operating consoles. He sat down and immediately began accessing files, then slowed as he saw the screens arrayed before him showing the world through the eyes of criminals.

‘Wow,’ he uttered as he stared in amazement at the technical fecundity. ‘I wouldn’t have believed this possible in my wildest dreams.’

‘Your wildest dreams are about to become your wildest nightmares if you don’t get to work,’ Jarvis snapped. ‘The only reason you got security clearance to be in here at all is because I asked for it. How long?’

Hellerman did not look up as he worked feverishly at his console. ‘The code is complex, unsurprisingly, but I can have it cracked in an hour or two.’

‘We have a minute or two,’ Jarvis pointed out.

‘Which is why I’m creating a work — around,’ Hellerman said as his fingers flew across the keyboard. ‘It won’t give us a permanent signal but it will be enough to give Lopez a decent look through the eyes of our unwitting assassin. I only hope it’s enough for her to identify them.’

‘She won’t need long,’ Jarvis figured. ‘An eye — point position can be triangulated, and the Secret Service can move in and quietly remove whoever it is before they can be made to act.’

Hellerman nodded as new data flooded down his screen.

‘I’ve got signals traffic at eight hundred eighty hertz in the vicinity of the White House,’ he said, his voice touched now with excitement. ‘Can’t pinpoint the location but it’s definitely there. Somebody’s acting as a booster in the crowd.’

‘So we’re looking for two people,’ Jarvis muttered. ‘Can you locate the booster?’

‘No,’ Hellerman said, ‘but I can do the next best thing. I can give you their number.’

Jarvis watched as on a second screen a cell phone number popped up. He didn’t need to look at it for long to know whose number it was.

‘LeMay,’ he said finally. ‘Damn it, MJ–12 do want this attack to go ahead.’

‘The Director FBI is in the crowd,’ Hellerman confirmed.

Jarvis felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket and he answered it immediately. ‘Jarvis?’

‘It’s Vaughn,’ came the reply. ‘We just did a scan of Hannah’s frontal lobes and we found the device.’

‘Good,’ Jarvis replied, ‘where are you both now?’

‘We’re on our way to the White House just like you ordered, but isn’t that the last thing we should be doing?’

‘How the hell did Hannah’s implant get through the X — Ray scanner without being detected?!’ Jarvis asked, ignoring Vaughn’s last.

‘Because it’s not metal,’ Vaughn replied. ‘It’s made from a biodegradable polymer, a synthetic mesh that mimics human tissue. It looks like the Chinese got further down the road with these implants than we thought. They don’t even use conductive probes any more, but instead the implant has a mesh rolled up inside it that is injected through a needle just one micrometer thick. The mesh unravels once the implant is in place. Believe it or not, the mesh actually melds with the victim’s brain tissue once injected and remains there for a limited time before breaking down and disappearing, and is designed to allow the interception of communications between the brain’s neurons. It’s based on some kind of advanced technology being developed by Harvard to treat neurodegenerative disorders — the Chinese must have copied the tech’ and incorporated it into their devices. Even the internal chips are biodegradable, and the whole thing unravels and embeds itself in the brain in less than half an hour. We’ve only tested this on mice in the US, but the Chinese have gone much further.’

Jarvis stared into space for a moment before replying.

‘No evidence left behind,’ he said finally. ‘Is the implant still in place?’

‘Yeah, the doctors don’t want it out of her until they’re sure they can remove it without causing permanent damage.’

Jarvis took a deep breath before he replied.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Leave it there and get Hannah into the White House right now. We have control of her chip, so she won’t do anything that she shouldn’t.’

There was a long pause on the line. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘That’s a matter of national security, literally,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Get her there and I’ll take care of the rest, okay?’

Jarvis shut off the line and saw Hellerman looking up at him from the corner of one eye as he worked.

‘What are you looking at?’ Jarvis snapped. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘I know,’ Hellerman replied, ‘but I don’t know if what you’re doing is the right thing.’

Ethan weaved the Harley Davidson through the dense lines of traffic, the big bike’s loud engine helping to clear the way as drivers heard him coming and pulled aside to give him more room. The Sportster was slim enough to slip through the gaps he was offered, the rumbling engine echoing through the ranks of traffic.

Ahead, a large Ford Ranger occupied by a beefy looking man in a white vest pulled across and blocked Ethan’s path. Ethan saw the shaved head and cruel grin of the driver reflected in his rear view mirror as he looked back and chuckled at the sight of Ethan’s Harley pinned among the traffic behind him.

Ethan slipped the bike into neutral, took his hands off the bars and reached beneath his jacket. He pulled out the 9mm pistol and aimed it at the Ford’s rear view mirror. The big driver’s smirk dissolved into panic as his eyes widened and then Ethan fired.

The bullet smashed into the mirror and shattered it into thousands of sparkling pieces that showered down onto the road as drivers to his left and right cried out in horror. The Ford Ranger’s engine growled and it pulled over. Ethan slipped the pistol back into its shoulder holster, kicked the Harley into gear and pulled past the truck, not dignifying the driver with even a glance as he continued on his way off DuPont Circle and south toward Pennsylvania Avenue.