Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(30)
“Hello, operator. I need a number in Washington, DC. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I can wait.”
Denise Jennings ducked into the break room, glancing over at the Bunn coffeemaker sitting on the counter beside the stainless steel sink. A thin layer of dark-brown liquid covered the bottom of the glass pot.
Damn it! Didn’t anyone else make coffee when the pot got low?
She briefly considered reprogramming Big John to find the obnoxious culprit, shook her head, pulled the filter basket, and dumped its contents into the trash can. Thirty seconds after that, fresh coffee began pouring from the Bunn into the empty pot.
Jesus. How hard was that?
Five minutes later she returned to her lab, steaming mug in hand, swiped her ID badge through the electronic reader, leaned forward for the retina scan, and, hearing the lock click back, opened the door. Ignoring the handful of staff not at lunch, she turned right into her office, closed the door behind her, and sat down at her desk. Sipping from the “I’m crabby in the morning” mug, she typed in her computer password. She’d done it so often that the sixteen-character mix of upper-and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols, though it changed weekly, presented no significant one-handed challenge.
As the log-in screen was replaced by her desktop display, Denise froze. Big John had opened a popup dialog:
Denise Jennings...Eyes Only
Just below the text, another login and password prompt blinked at her. Denise stared at the prompt for several seconds, dread building in her gut until she felt nauseated.
Her fingers danced across the keyboard, the password dialog fading away, replaced by the familiar Big John response window.
Datapoint Acquired.
Correlation to Jack Gregory Query = 0.943732
Event:
McFarland/Smythe Call to FBI.
Reported computer chat contact with:
Mark Smythe
Jennifer Smythe
Heather McFarland
Next chat contact scheduled today, 22 April, 22:30 Hrs.
A 94 percent correlation to her Jack Gregory query.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
As much as she’d hoped her handoff of information to Freddy Hagerman had ended her involvement, that clearly wasn’t happening. Big John had his hooks in her, and apparently he didn’t intend to let go until he’d bled her dry. Denise had been so busy she hadn’t gotten around to canceling her high-priority intelligence information request yet. So, of course, Big John made sure he returned critical information before she did, information that could send her to prison if she chose to ignore it.
Denise closed the window and leaned back in her chair, her heart thumping against her rib cage like one of those movie aliens trying to chew its way out. Well, she wasn’t going to jail. If it took playing both ends against the middle to assure that, so be it.
Denise picked up the phone on her desk, punched in the internal five-digit number, and waited.
“General Wilson.” The NSA director’s voice seemed to echo through her head.
“Sir. This is Denise Jennings. We’ve got a situation.”
Lieutenant General Robert “Balls” Wilson leaned back in his chair at the end of the conference table, hands clasped behind his head. As smart as Admiral Riles had been, Denise knew that Balls Wilson had him beat. Air Force Academy, Rhodes scholar, All-American linebacker, Caltech PhD in computer science, combat fighter pilot, former commander of NORAD, the first black NSA director was a seriously formidable individual.
He insisted that his staff address him by his fighter pilot handle, Balls, a play on the sports implication of his last name, reveling in the fact that it made some people uncomfortable. Denise was one of them. Still, she had to admit she liked the man. As far as she could tell he sweated liquid charisma.
Arrayed around the table were Levi Elias, generally regarded as the best intel analyst the NSA had, Dr. Bert Mathews, the computer scientist who had been chosen to fill Dr. Kurtz’s shoes, and Karl Oberstein, the NSA’s chief of operations.
“OK, Denise, show us what you’ve got.”
Nodding to the general, Denise picked up the remote control, pressed the green power button, and walked to the front of the room. The digital display that formed the entire wall came to life, its high-definition background image a lovely high-resolution shot of Earth from space, an image so crystal-clear it had no counterpart in the civilian world, having been taken by one of the most sophisticated spy satellites ever created. If the satellite had been focused on the parking lot outside the Crystal Palace, not only could you have read the license plates, the multispectral imagery product could have told you how long the car had been parked there, from the heat of the engines. It could have shown you which parking spots had been recently vacated, from the differences in temperature of the ground that had been under the vehicles.
Denise pressed a sequence of buttons on the remote, pulling up the presentation she had spent the last two hours preparing.
“Balls. Gentlemen. I asked for this meeting to show you something that Big John brought to my attention this morning. The subject of the correlative data search was Jack ‘the Ripper’ Gregory.”
Seeing that she had their rapt attention, Denise flicked to the first slide. It showed the text message she’d received earlier in the day.
“I received this Big John alert shortly after noon today. What you need now is some context for the message so that you understand its importance.