Anti-Terror Task Force operative Ray Bliss couldn’t get the questions out of his head as he hurried through the corridors of the American Embassy Berlin. How could a train filled with recycled plutonium and under continuous electronic surveillance just vanish? A train with eight GPS-tagged cars couldn’t just disappear, could it?
Bliss, like hundreds of security operatives around the world, had trained for this nightmare hypothetical, but he still couldn’t believe it was real. What first seemed to be nothing but a fluke, a GPS snafu, was now escalating rapidly. Bliss desperately wanted to get out into the field to kick some terrorist ass, but the umbrella agenc,y which American spooks used to share information in the brave new world of post-9/11 intelligence sharing, the multiagency Anti-Terror Task Force, or ATTF, had assigned him to the “B” plan. If the combined militaries of the EU, the US and Russia with all their high-tech toys didn’t locate the train within the next 48 to 72 hours, and the unthinkable hadn’t happened, an agent would be sent in. Bliss’ job was recruiting that agent.
So while the rest of the world sprang into action, he had spent the last two days dogging a young American graduate student around Berlin.
He hated recruiting agents. Especially sweet naïve kids like Fritzi Jordan. The task force must be desperate to think of turning to her for help. She would make a terrible agent. How could Fritzi, with her face like an open book, have secrets dark enough to interest the ATTF?
Bliss stepped aside so that his guide, Michael Usher, a tall, buff, dark-haired man in his early forties, could insert a key into the elevator control panel, then followed ATTF’s CIA Liaison, Laura Murphy and her FBI counterpart, Mackenzie Kilbane, into the elevator.
Usher’s official title was ‘Director of the Commercialization Initiative for Eastern Europe.’ It sounded impressive. But while still shaking Bliss’ hand in the security cage just inside the Embassy front door, Usher had already made it clear that his assignment to Commercial was both temporary and below his usual pay grade.
Bliss watched Usher greet private contractor after private contractor with top-secret clearance badges and wondered about the brave new world of American espionage. He was used to seeing US government operations at NASA, Department of Defense, even NSA, DIA and CIA farmed out to temporary workers, AKA ‘private contractors’. But the way Usher glad-handed his way past guards and through sliding glass security doors down, down, down into the National Security Agency’s super secret Berlin complex took privatization to a whole new level.
The elevator doors slid open, and they entered the third sub-basement of the Embassy. While Usher was distracted with an iris scan at the final security check, Bliss stole a glance at Laura Murphy and Mackenzie Kilbane.
Murphy was hiding her true feelings and gave Usher her best, smiling, ‘I’m so very impressed’ mask.
Mackenzie arched a perfectly tweezed and penciled eyebrow at Bliss. Usher’s tour-guiding was annoying her as well. But then, what didn’t annoy Mackenzie, his ex-wife’s best friend? He knew she was thinking the same thing he was… a millionaire playing tour guide through a secret government facility was more that just odd.
Bliss had spent most of his working life watching high-status males sniff out their territory, but the vibes he was getting from Usher felt wrong. He was trying too hard to blend in with the US government mandarins in their central European outpost.
Bliss’ own disguise, his daily one-and-a-half hours in the gym, was intended to reinforce the idea that he was brawn, not brains. If someone happened to recognize Bliss from the tabloids, his athletic appearance kept them believing everything they had read about him and his ex-wife, Cheryl, the celebrity daughter of an American Senator. It must all be true, no? Bliss was an intellectual lightweight. Beer-drinking buddy material. Bliss could follow orders, but was unlikely to strike off on his own.
It was a disguise that worked.
Usher’s friendly smile had discounted brawn-not-brains Bliss seconds after their introduction. He had moved on with that sixth sense Washingtonians were so blessed with, to the people he identified as holding the real reins of power, Mackenzie Kilbane and Laura Murphy.
As the ten-inch thick vault doors slid open, Usher took four sets of specially-coated glasses from a rack.
Below pay-grade or not, Usher was enjoying this, Bliss thought, as they entered an enormous brick-lined, underground cavern.
Bliss had never been inside, but he had heard the legends… Built by the Nazis the cavern had been intended as the Brandenburg Gate Subway Station, but it had never actually been connected to the Berlin transportation grid. It had had to be abandoned when the nearby Spree River began leaking in through the stone ceiling.
Now owned by the US, the ‘cave’ was so deep underground that no radio, no TV, no electromagnetic signals of any kind got in or out, unless NSA wanted them to, Usher said.
He explained how the glasses enhanced the visibility of the cave’s communications lasers. They slipped them on and walked to the railing of the observation platform.
In the center of the huge cavern a meter-wide blue column of laser light stretched down from the ceiling. Signals collected up on the Embassy’s rooftop by the antennas under its radio-transparent shed were sent directly down here into the cavern for analysis.
Until Edward Snowden, Usher told them, sustainability-minded Berliners assumed the tent-like structure on top of the American Embassy was a passive cooling system intended to reduce global warming by scaling down the Embassy’s reliance on air conditioning. It had been great while it lasted.
They watched more tubes of light flicker on. Blue, and as big around as a man’s arm, they beamed from the center column to five van-sized supercomputers, which radiated pencil-thin, lateral blue beams outward, like giant, spinning, bicycle wheels. These thin secondary beams were reflected by rapidly rotating mirrors through clear glass cubicle dividers into the workstations of individual analysts.
Usher pointed out an intricate web of red light rays hovering near the top of the central laser column just under the ceiling. It enclosed a flickering blue light cloud.
A Blue Widow, Bliss realized, even though he had never seen one. It just had to be… A quantum computer, right here in Berlin, in the heart of the EU. This was the real reason NSA intelligence gatherers were called spiders. Neither their spy satellite networks, nor their globe-spanning listening installations had earned them that nickname.
No jewelry, not even metal eyeglasses were allowed, Usher told them. No reflective surfaces to accidentally deflect or slow the flow of ion qubit processed information from the fabled quantum computer known as, yes, it really does exist, wink, wink, the ‘Blue Widow.’
For years competing camps had argued whether quantum dots or quantum wire was the best material for a quantum computer, he went on. Once the quantum tunneling effect was fully understood, the answer was obvious. Dots were combined with wires and the world saw its first working quantum computer.
The luminous blue cloud flecked with rainbow sparkles drifted downward.
They were seeing billions of superconducting quantum wires made of assembled metallic carbon nanotubes, Usher explained. The rainbow-coloured flickering was caused when quantum dots were confined inside microscopic crystal matrices.
He gave them a minute to admire the show, then continued. The lights were an optical artefact, a meaningless, though pretty side-effect. The photons doing the actual work inside a quantum computer were in the microwave range and not part of the visible light spectrum.
The Blue Widow could capture and analyze 100 billion bits of data per second. Emails, attachments, faxes, every type of communication… they were all pulled into the Widow’s gigantic maw once the semantic trigger was activated. Phone calls over the internet, landlines, satellites or cell towers… they were all the same to her. Inside her maw, the quantum spider could digest data streams from a million-plus DSL lines simultaneously.
Even the most highly-encrypted communications snared in the
Widow’s web weren’t immune to her delicate touch, Usher went on. She could detect the spin of a mere ion, and whether or not it had been altered. Ordinary encryption schemes, 512-bit RSA algorithms and Abelian discrete logs could be cracked in an instant. Here he gave the ‘girls,’ Murphy and Mackenzie, a friendly grin in case their mathematics couldn’t follow the technical details.
The Widow was so fast, she all but eliminated the need to physically crack encryption. Real-time metadata analyzers were triggered, hitting targets almost instantaneously and allowing the quantum computer to follow digital communications out into the real world, at the speed of light, finding suspected terrorists before they logged off a network. Encrypting and decrypting mathematics were being obsoleted, and Blue Widows here in Berlin, back home in Bluffdale, Utah, in Bude in Cornwall, in southern England, and in Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia were becoming NSA’s new ‘brain’ centers, keeping the world safe, not just for Americans, but for all of humankind.
Ray Bliss tried to look impressed, but he was old-fashioned enough to believe the best intelligence was collected by people with their feet on the ground, walking through a souk in Syria, or Kabul, or in a restaurant on the fifth floor of Berlin’s KaDeWe department store watching who a German senator met for lunch. People, not machines, made the world safer, and they did it by befriending others, by cultivating agents. Much as he hated doing it, it worked.
The Widow was a mindless insatiable carnivore, nothing brain-like about her. The fantastic amount of information in this cavern was nothing but undigested pap culled from the electronic ether that surrounded the Earth. No one could seriously call it intelligence.
They handed their glasses back to Usher, and the room turned into an ordinary high-ceilinged workspace.
As Usher led them along a raised walkway, Bliss noticed that the spiderlings wearing green, private consultant security badges were in the majority. For-profit patriotism at its finest. The defense contractor who sold the Widow concept to NSA was no doubt earning additional billions by providing the analysts to sort through the “chatter” the Widow trapped in her maw.
They entered a glass-enclosed conference room where the rest of the ATTF team waited. Usher indicated the empty chairs at the oval table and Murphy pulled out the chair next to Bliss. She was sticking to him like a shadow now that he had agreed to help.
“What happened with Fritzi Jordan?” Murphy whispered, after they sat down.
“Please tell me you’ve located the train,” he answered.
Murphy shook her head.
“She’s going to make a terrible spy. We’ve got to find someone else.”
“She’s all we have,” Murphy said.
Usher shut the door and flicked a switch built into the tabletop. Faraday cage, he told Bliss, when nothing happened. The glass walls were impregnated with platinum wire that emitted camouflaging electromagnetic signals and jammed electronic snooping. Layers upon layers of security even within the NSA complex itself, he explained, then flicked a second switch to opaque the glass conference room walls.
Was it really necessary to hide what happened in here from the spiderlings outside, Bliss wondered? More likely another billionaire defense contractor with friends in Washington had sold the government something it didn’t need. A Faraday cage this deep underground was typical of security-industrial-complex overspending. The Berlin Embassy was a fortress, and this conference room was at its very core, so deep underground that you couldn’t get more secure.
Bliss lost patience with Usher’s incessant bragging about NSA technology. “Have the train hijackers given us a list of their demands?” he asked the assembled ATTF members.
A deer-caught-in-the-headlights look appeared on faces around the room. How could they not know they were dealing with a hijacking. What else could it be?
“Not yet,” Murphy answered. She nodded to the ATTF member from Defense Intelligence and the briefing began.
“We’ve checked and rechecked. The GPS satellites are functioning normally. No sign of the plutonium train’s signal for more than 24 hours now.”
The Air Force intelligence officer nodded for a satellite specialist, a civilian expert from Rayojet, to provide details.“We’ve moved two spy birds into position.”
“One bird has a high resolution camera; the other a variety of instrumentation including on-board radiation detection that will locate the train if some whacko manages to crack the nut.”
“Crack the nut?” someone from State asked.
A DOE physicist summarized the technology. “Each 60-ton castor is a set of three casks, one inside the other, like those Russian dolls. Three lids, each weighing 2 tons, are screwed, welded and bolted over an inner cask containing 300 rods of plutonium and spent nuclear fuel glued together by a lead slurry.
“Plutonium is an alpha-emitter and relatively safe to handle, since alpha particles can’t pass through a simple sheet of paper, let alone human skin. Mixing plutonium from decommissioned nuclear missiles with beta- and gamma particle emitters, the highly toxic fission products from nuclear power generation is the best way to safeguard plutonium and keep it out of the hands of terrorists.
“To extract the plutonium the lead slurry has to be melted and the rods sorted with a gamma counter. Those rods that don’t emit gamma radiation are the plutonium. They have to be found in under ten minutes. Any longer, and the terrorist is doing a Litvinenko…remember that Russian guy in London? He will be committing suicide by radiation poisoning.”
“What are we telling the press?” Bliss asked.
“Nothing until we have to,” Usher said. “We’ve released a piece announcing NATO air search-and-rescue practice exercises to explain the helicopters.”
“Practice exercises?” an Army Special Forces officer sneered.
“Yes, practice,” Murphy said. “Terror feeds on public panic. If there isn’t any immediate danger to the general public, we contain the terror by keeping a low profile.”
“What about the anti-nuke demonstrators along the train’s route?” Bliss asked. “How long before they start asking what happened to the train.”
“The Germans and Poles have issued a joint statement saying the train was redirected to avoid the demonstrations.” Murphy said. “That should give us a day or two.”
“And the blogosphere?” Bliss asked. “What do the internet conspiracy theorists say?”
“We found a blogger trying to go public through anonymizers in Norway and Finland about an hour ago,” Usher said.
“Did we pinpoint his location?” Murphy asked. “He could be connected to the hijackers.”
“He disappeared from the net as soon as he noticed us,” Usher answered. “But NSA has intercepted a cell phone call that seems related. I’ve had the analysts go over it. They’ve typed up a report.” He slid a stack of paper onto the table, and ATTF members reached for a copy.
“If it’s all the same to you, Mike,” Defense Intelligence interrupted, “I think we should listen to the original intercept. Relying on the analysts is what let 9/11 happen.”
“Of course.” Usher nodded agreeably, but the way he added sugar and cream to his coffee while the aide played the recording said, he wasn’t liking this. Why? Bliss wondered.
After several seconds of digital break up, they heard a man’s voice. His accent was so heavy; it took several seconds more to recognize his words as English. Usher paused the recording. “Russian still leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouths of east Europeans. English has become their lingua franca.” He nodded for the recording to resume.
“…if nothing goes wrong,” the man said, before highway noise rendered his words unintelligible.
“Nothing will go wrong,” a second man said. “The train goes missing for a day, maybe two. Then, once our demands are met, it reappears.”
“And if they aren’t met?”
“Then the Americans will learn the hard way that we don’t need feudal overlords. They can’t just move i
nto eastern Europe and take over our businesses like modern-day Teutonic Knights.”
“Or like Russians?”
“Exactly. The train will be a strike back for all of us, for Poland, Latvia, Armenia, Belarus, Azerbaijan…We’ll show them they can’t just do whatever they want.”
The response was indecipherable.
“When they can’t find the train, the Americans will turn to us,” said the second man. We will show them that they need us to maintain security on our own territory, not those lazy know-it-all defense consultants in their expensive suits.”
Usher signaled the tech to stop.
“Did you trace it?” Murphy asked.
“No chance. The signals were rigged to bounce the from cell tower repeater to cell tower repeater in a two hundred kilometer circle in southern Poland.” Usher said. “But we do know we’re not dealing with Muslim terrorists. NSA linguists have identified the highway speaker as Belorussian.”
The grim smile Usher used to share this small triumph screamed ‘performance.’ What was he hiding? Bliss wondered.
“NSA hit pay dirt with ID-ing the second voice,” Usher said, his voice artificially cheery.
He was unhappy that the voice had been ID-ed, Bliss realized. Why?
Mackenzie Kilbane, ATTF’s FBI Liaison, opened the orange folder lying in front of her. “His name is Pawlowski… Jan Pawlowski. He’s head of the Polish Sports Ministry. Because of his many media appearances… opening new soccer stadiums, introducing Polish athletes to TV audiences, and so on, his voice was easy to ID.”
“What are we waiting for? Let’s go get him,” the Air Force general said.
“We can’t,” said the State Department lawyer next Mackenzie. “He’s a government official.”
“But we have the recording. Let’s take it to the Polish police, or Interpol, if the Poles won’t do anything.”
“If EU law enforcement officials find out about this recording, they’ll come at us with human rights and privacy complaints,” Mackenzie added. “Remember Edward Snowden and all the trouble that caused?”
“We don’t want to go there,” agreed the lawyer from State.
“Can’t we contact the Polish government directly?” the general asked. “They’re usually on board with our thinking on security.”
“We can’t chance someone tipping him off,” Murphy said.
“We can get in, grab him, and be back out before they know what hit them,” said a former Special Forces major.
“Poland is our ally,” the State Department woman reminded.
“A plutonium heist by a government minister? Nice ally,” the major countered.
“It’s not like he’s the Polish president.” Defense Intelligence sided with the major, and the discussion fell apart into crosstalk.
“Plutonium!” The Air Force general shook his head. “This Pawlowski can’t have any idea what he snagged.”
“At least we’re not dealing with Salafists.”
“No. Just plutonium, the stuff in nuclear bombs!”
“How do we know the train isn’t in Chechnya, as we speak.”
“Christ! How out of control do we let this get? I say, let’s nab him. Now.”
“Right. If the Poles don’t like it, too bad. They voted this creep into office.”
“Actually they didn’t,” Mackenzie interrupted. “He was appointed.” She pulled a folder from her briefcase. “Let me start at the beginning.”
“In the late 90's Jan Pawlowski was a Sports Management major at Catholic University in Washington, DC. He overstayed his visa after graduation and became a boxing promoter with small potato clients… unknown eastern Europeans with dreams of hitting it big in America. After two expired visa warnings he went home to Poland, then came back legit.
“Things grew complicated when he started dating an NSA mathematician.” She pointed her smart phone at the white board. The phone’s on-board beamer projected a Power Point slide of a Maryland driver’s license that showed an attractive young black woman named Friederike Jordan, the agent Bliss had been hired to recruit.
“How Pawlowski met Friederike, AKA Fritzi, Jordan remains a mystery,” Mackenzie said. “Jordan’s FBI background file actually calls her a recluse. Regardless, they were linked romantically and became an item.”
Bliss watched Usher doodling on a legal pad, trying to hide that he wasn’t liking this. Why? he wondered.
“When the foreign-national boyfriend came up at Jordan’s monthly security vetting,” Mackenzie continued, “She tendered her resignation, but her situation was complicated.
“Mike, you were at NSA then. Why don’t you brief us on Jordan?”
Usher put down his pen and spoke. “She was working on Mojo, a vital NSA program that posed significant mathematical challenges. Pawlowski seemed a minor risk compared to letting a talent like Jordan walk. NSA decided to up her debriefings to once a week until Mojo was complete…”
“Mojo? What does Mojo do?” someone asked.
“Classified…need-to-know only,” Usher said.
Mackenzie’s perfectly made-up face froze into a look Bliss knew only too well.
“It’s a banking software,” she said, squashing the ‘my-secret-is-bigger-than-yours’ pissing contest before it could start.
Ms. Bitch hadn’t changed, Bliss thought. But this time she was right. Alpha male chest-beating wasted time.
“Mojo analyzes banking deposits and withdrawals for patterns indicating money laundering, terrorist funding, or other illegal activity, and sends a report to analysts at the FBI,” she continued. “Any bank doing business in the US, along with its affiliates worldwide, is required to install Mojo on their computer systems.”
“Even Arab banks use it,” Murphy added. “Since they don’t trust American banking software, NSA provides Mojo free-of-charge to Grumbeer AG, the Swiss company that provides most of the Arab world with its banking transaction software.
Mackenzie returned to her file. “Pawlowski was already on our radar apart from his relationship with Jordan. Minor allegations like placing bets on fights and forgetting to pay the taxes on his winnings. He had a good lawyer who made it all go away.
“Things came to a head after the World Heavyweight Fight at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The champ, a Swedish hulk with the constitution of a bear and a reputation for extreme good health, no booze, no drugs, not even food preservatives, a man who ate only organically-grown chicken and fish, was struck by dizziness in the middle of the fourth round. Twenty seconds later a light tap from the New Jersey challenger sent him sprawling and the casinos scrambling to cover the bets Pawlowski had on the challenger.
“The new champ turned out to be a one trick pony. The former titleholder returned almost immediately to his former good health and was accused of having taken a dive. His dizzy spells remained a mystery. He had a sworn doctor’s statement that an examination after the fight had shown indications of possible insulin poisoning, but the customary blood and urine samples taken in the dressing room right after the fight had already disappeared from the Las Vegas anti-doping lab by the next morning. Without those he couldn’t prove his innocence. The Boxing Commission banned him for life from fighting anywhere in the US, effectively ending his career.”
“We showed Jordan photos of the disgraced champ in the back room of a Stockholm fight club watching the video and trying to understand how he had been defeated,” Usher said.
“Maybe that got to her,” Mackenzie said. “Maybe it was seeing how rich Pawlowski got by betting against him. Maybe it was something personal between the two of them. Whatever it was, Jordan ended it. Refused to see Pawlowski again.”
“That was when we discovered an NSA flash drive missing from an office next to Jordan’s.” Usher broke in.
“Yes. That was worrisome.” Mackenzie’s polished exterior cracked slightly, as she let her annoyance with Usher show. Intentionally, like a cat flexing its claws.
Usher backed off, and she
went on. “Pawlowski returned to Poland and used his winnings to set himself up in politics, but Polish elections proved harder to fix than Las Vegas fights. His ambitions remained thwarted until the Polish Sports Minister was gunned down, gangland-style, on a Warsaw street. Pawlowski was appointed his successor.
“He hasn’t done a bad job. He’s taken kids off the street by expanding after-school sports clubs. He has also renovated sports stadiums, and so on. Polish internet gambling and sports betting have exploded. In fact his bank accounts have grown so rapidly, that Interpol suspects he’s using the gambling as a money laundry for profits from his other criminal activities.
“You name it and he’s got a finger in the pie…smuggling untaxed cigarettes into western EU countries, counterfeiting pharmaceuticals, providing the German black market with gangs of low-wage illegals for construction work, shipping recreational drugs to Amsterdam, weapons to Uzbekistan. We’ve used Mojo to shut down his accounts at American banks and their EU affiliates, but now he’s borrowing a page from the Camorra down in Naples by putting his cash into landfilling. That makes stopping him significantly harder.”
Mackenzie sipped water. “Garbage is the ideal money laundry. Paperwork can be forged. Tonnage inflated. Landfill pit liners are paid for on paper, but never delivered or installed. Waste haulers take something no one wants and they make it go away. As long as the garbage doesn’t lie around stinking up the streets, nobody cares. Not even when links to organized crime start showing up.”
“It’s such a good deal, Pawlowski is about to have himself appointed Environment Minister,” Murphy added.
“But we caught a break,” Mackenzie said. “Incredibly, Friederike Jordan, Pawlowski’s ex-girlfriend from his Washington days is living right here in Berlin.”
“How do we know she isn’t still seeing him?” Usher asked. “Berlin is less than a hundred miles from the Polish border.”
“Because my people say, no,” Murphy answered. “She’s been a good girl. Stays away from pure math and encryption as per her NSA termination agreements, and checks in with the Embassy regular as clockwork.”
“What about that flash drive that disappeared while she was at NSA?” Usher asked.
“Circumstantial. If NSA does a thorough check, they’ll probably find a filing error.” Mackenzie let her sweetest, most polished smile slip over her face. “Maybe even by your own staff, Michael.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Why don’t you leave the field operations to us, Michael?”
Usher returned to his notes and tried to hide his anger.
Mackenzie turned to Bliss. “Has she agreed to help?”
“Not yet. Frankly, I don’t think she’s going to bite,” he said.
“Just bring her to the party, Ray. We’ll keep her safe.”
Bliss raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing is guaranteed.”
Right, he thought, not even supplementing a government pension by odd-jobbing for Uncle Sam. He should have quit after his logistics stint in Anatolia, when that first job took him back to Europe.
3 Prague