Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (35 page)

In the walled-off, climate-controlled portion of the Red Room, Captain Trevor Kingsburgh, a computer specialist on loan from U.S. Space Command, wearing civilian clothes and an FBI jacket, delivered the bad news.

He showed Lyle and Roz one of the data-storage units he’d removed from the block of eight metal shelving racks in the center of the chilly room. “The good news,” the captain said, “is that the installation has eight hundred and fifty one-point-five-terabyte hot-swap drives like this one. If it’s set up with a standard configuration, that works out to about five hundred and seventy drives to hold the entire SARGE database, two hundred to manipulate it, cache, and cross-sort searches, and eighty or so units as redundant spares.”

Lyle let those figures slip past him, focused on something more important. “Yet you don’t seem happy.”

“Every drive I’ve examined has been wiped clean. So there’s unlikely to be evidence that SARGE was ever used here.”

Roz jumped in before he could. “No way you can erase eight hundred and fifty terabytes in an hour.”

“Not through software,” Kingsburgh agreed, “but look over here.” He carried the drive to a small worktable. “Recognize those?”

Roz picked up something that to Lyle looked like a large handheld hair dryer completely sealed in red plastic—no air vents. There were five others
like it on the table, each with a long electrical cord and standard plug. “It’s an old bulk eraser. Generates a powerful magnetic field. It’s designed to erase videotapes by the box load.”

Roz wasn’t happy, either. She turned back to Kingsburgh. “Are you going to be able to reconstruct anything that was on them?”

“We’ll check them all, sector by sector, but . . . hold those erasers within a foot of the drives for a few seconds . . . that’s all it takes.”

“I didn’t see any bulk erasers in the other room,” Roz said. Her eyes narrowed. She was getting an idea. Lyle began to hope. “So I’d bet the techs didn’t get a chance to use them on their workstations.”

The junior agent headed purposefully through the cylindrical door to the other side of the Red Room. Lyle and Kingsburgh followed.

There was an AFOSI technician or an air force specialist at each of the eight workstations at the back of the room. At the conference table, two of Ironwood’s programmers waited, hands bound by plastic restraints.

One was Keisha Harrill, a young woman about Roz’s age, with dreadlocks, jeans, and a T-shirt showing a large green dinosaur above the words
NEVER FORGET
. Lyle didn’t get it, but Roz thought it was funny. Naturally.

The other prisoner was Joost Chatto, a tall, awkward man who had his head down, intent on studying something fascinating on the floor, or maybe it was the knife-sharp crease ironed into his jeans.

Both Harrill and Chatto had been in the Red Room when the AFOSI technicians had entered. Both had thus far refused to answer any questions. That generally meant they knew something. Their turn would come.

Lyle waited, patient, as his junior agent zeroed in on one of the AFOSI technicians at a workstation. After a quick conversation, the two consulted the technician’s thick red binder with secret emblazoned on its cover; then Roz stood behind the tech as he typed. Both looked pleased by the text that appeared on the screen, and Roz came back to tell Lyle why.

“Slam-dunk. We found a subdirectory on the local hard drive that lists files in the SARGE format. That should be enough to establish that the workstation had access to the SARGE database.”

Captain Kingsburgh still wasn’t happy.

“Might not be that simple,” he said. “Like I said, two reasons for concern—the fact that all the drives have been wiped, and the fact that this installation isn’t big enough for what it needs to do.”

“Why not?” Lyle asked.

“That partial printout you turned in, of the unknown coastline. Its level of resolution is at least six times greater than anything SARGE can produce. Plus, it’s showing a structure at something like ninety meters underground. At best, SARGE can only go two to three meters below the
surface—and that’s with favorable soil and moisture conditions, not the kind of rocks we’ve got in that image.”

Lyle saw no reason to admit defeat. “So what else do we need to find?”

Kingsburgh looked over to the retrofitted wall that cut the room in half. “For a global database with that level of detail . . . we need to find at least another thirty-five hundred drives to go with the eight hundred and fifty in there. All networked together.” The captain shifted the unit he carried to his other arm. “If I were you, I’d start looking for a few more heavily air-conditioned rooms.”

“We won’t find them,” Roz said to Lyle.

“Because?”

“Because there’s no outside network here. These workstations connect to each other and to the drives in the air-conditioned room, and that’s it. There’s not even an ordinary phone line leading out of this place, so there’s no way they can access any other database or network.”

“Then we’ve got a problem,” Kingsburgh said. “However that printout was generated, it had to come from something more than just the SARGE database. Because they’re processing a lot more information than what they could’ve stored here.”

Roz looked around, searching for inspiration, Lyle knew. “Then how about this? Somehow Ironwood’s managed to get access to a second database, similar to SARGE, but . . . better.”

Kingsburgh glanced around to see if anyone was within earshot. No one was, but he stepped closer anyway and dropped his voice. “The EMPIRE satellite constellation that produced SARGE, the synthetic-aperture radar technology the satellites use . . . we’re the only country with that capability.”

“Then another possibility,” Lyle said. “If we can keep EMPIRE a secret from other countries, could other countries be keeping their version of the same technology secret from us?”

Kingsburgh made quick work of that idea. “Why would Ironwood steal the SARGE database to sell to another country if the other country already had a better version?”

“Unless . . .” Roz said slowly.

“Don’t stop there,” Lyle prompted her.

“What if Ironwood’s not interested in
selling
SARGE? What if he’s the end user?”

Lyle was impressed. Something new he himself hadn’t considered. “So . . . he obtained a copy of SARGE for himself . . . and also bought or stole a similar database from China or Russia—”

“Or Switzerland,” Roz said.

The captain from U.S. Space Command looked confused. “Switzerland? They don’t have spy satellites.”

Roz looked at Lyle, silently asking permission.

He nodded. “Go ahead.”

“When our inside man, Weir, disappeared,” Roz began, “he was being shot at by operators working for a private security firm based out of Zurich. Cross Executive Protection. Then, two weeks ago, we picked up another guy who worked for Cross, who’d been in another gunfight that Weir also was involved in.”

“Except,” Lyle added, “two weeks ago, the Cross operator was apparently trying to protect Weir. The day Weir disappeared, the Cross operators were trying to stop him.”

The captain thought that over, then stated the obvious. “Weir made a deal with Cross and then reneged.”

“He made a deal with someone,” Lyle agreed. “Your line of work, ever hear of the MacCleirigh Foundation?”

Kingsburgh hadn’t.

“Neither had we. Turns out, that’s the entity that owns Cross, and it’s the company’s only client.”

“Private army?” Kingsburgh asked.

“Close enough.”

“What kind of foundation is it?”

“Scholarly research and such. Funds archaeological digs, university grants, museums . . . everything seems aboveboard.”

“Seems?”

Lyle shrugged. “They have that private army. Or, at least, a private security force. And that force has some kind of connection to Weir.”

“If you were running Weir as a way to get into Ironwood’s organization, maybe Cross or their employees were doing the same. Weir’s the pawn caught in the middle.”

“If so,” Lyle said, “here’s the big question. Is the MacCleirigh Foundation trying to get to Ironwood to buy the SARGE database from him, or are they the ones who sold it to him in the first place?”

“You think a scholarly foundation is involved in international espionage?”

“There’re so many left turns in this case, I don’t know what to think. The Foundation’s worth billions, tens of billions, so maybe that’s how they make their money: buying and selling state secrets.”

“Worth looking at,” Kingsburgh suggested.

“We will.” Lyle waited to see if the captain would say more, but he didn’t. Time to move on. If Kingsburgh didn’t have any secret store of classified knowledge to share . . .

The captain got the hint. “I’ll check the rest of the drives. See if they missed erasing one.” He headed for the cylindrical door to the sealed half of the room.

Roz gave Lyle a stern look.

“What now?” he asked.

“Some reason you didn’t mention the elephant in the room?”

“Yes. I’d like to keep my reputation as a rational investigator.”

“They’re Ironwood’s aliens, not yours. This is about what he believes, not you.”

“It’s a cover story, Roz. You know—Tony Soprano says he’s going to pick up the cannolis, and he really means the illegal goods, to throw off the Feds.”

“So what’s Ironwood talking about with Weir if he’s not talking about real aliens? Russians? Chinese? The Swiss?”

“You’re not telling me
you
think aliens are real.”

“What
I
think doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Ironwood believes. Don’t we have to start looking at this case from his perspective?”

“Fair enough,” Lyle said. “So what do you think that is?”

“I think Ironwood
is
the end user of the database.” Roz’s eyes were bright as she made the most of her chance to persuade him to her way of thinking. “Think about it: He’s obsessed with finding his alien outposts. He thinks they’re thousands of years old—that’s archaeological. The SARGE database, able to look underground, that’s got to be a valuable archaeological tool, wouldn’t you say? The MacCleirigh Foundation, they fund archaeological expeditions. So SARGE is valuable to Ironwood
and
the foundation—no enemy state need apply.

“What it comes down to is that maybe this isn’t an espionage case. Maybe this is just some modern-day Indiana Jones and SARGE is this year’s Holy Grail.”

It was a good argument, but it wasn’t on point.

“Whatever perspective you want to choose,” Lyle cautioned, “the database is stolen government property, and each moment it’s in the possession of someone other than the United States government, we’re at risk.”

“No argument.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“So . . . what do we do now?”

Lyle knew he had several options: He could attempt to interrogate the programmers at the table, but, since they’d already asked for their lawyer—tellingly,
the same one—there was obviously some kind of plan in place and none of them would be talking soon. He could wait to find out what Captain Kingsburgh might discover, provided Ironwood’s people hadn’t managed to erase every hard drive, but odds were they had. He could search Ironwood’s other facilities—but, if there were other large computing installations in one or more of them, it was also a good bet they were already being disassembled.

“Only one thing we can do.”

Roz gave him a sly smile, as if she knew what was coming.

“We need more information,” Lyle said. “Geospatial has to identify the shoreline in that printout.”

“And then . . . road trip?”

“Road trip.”

“I wonder what it was like.” Jess spoke quietly, as if in church.

David stood beside her on the bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Fog and mist filled the morning air. A hundred feet down, they could just make out slow waves gently frothing against the dark stones of the rocky beach. Beyond that, only haze. Even the cries of seabirds were indistinct.

“When do you think it was built?” David asked.

First thing this morning, he and Jess had copied the coordinates from the printout they’d made in Boston to a topographical map. According to that, and their handheld GPS unit, they were standing over what Ironwood hoped would be an alien outpost and what Jess believed would be a Family temple. Whatever it actually was, the site, carved out of the shale of Cornwall, lay some ninety feet below them.

“Nine thousand years ago.”

“Sea level would have been lower,” David said. “Sixty feet, at least.”

Jess flashed him a smile, as if he’d said something that amused her.

“What I meant was, how many people lived here? Were there ships? Piers? Festivals? Shops? What did it smell like? Did they have kilns for pottery? Ovens for bread? What was their world like?” Jess paused, as if overwhelmed by possibilities.

David offered his own approach to the unknown, distant past. “Well, their technology would be different, but the people would be just like us. Same emotions. Wants. Needs. Human nature doesn’t change.”

“The First Gods were different.”

David let it go. He, Jess, and Ironwood were in the same boat. All seeking proof. All running out of time to find it.