Hidden Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure Read online

  “Corkscrew.”

  “What about it?” He slips his index finger inside the collar of his shirt and tugs.

  “He’s a hacker. He’s working for you. He’s discovered a lot of the intelligence you have about Brookhaven.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “What else is there?” I push. “What other information does he have?”

  “Why don’t you ask Corkscrew yourself? You have the email, I assume.”

  “She won’t respond to me. She won’t know who I am.”

  “I’ll tell her to expect a message,” he says. “She can choose how to proceed from there. She may decide to ignore you. Or she may choose, at my gentle nudging, to assist you as she’s assisted me.”

  “By hacking into government systems?” Mack surmises.

  “You make it sound so blasé.” Sir Spencer pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and pats the beads of sweat forming on his brow. “Hacking into a secure government facility isn’t as it appears in film or on television. It’s not just a point and click endeavor. It can take weeks or months, maybe years, to effectively infiltrate said system.”

  “Is that how you know Dr. Wolf left the process there?” Bella asks. “This Corkscrew person found evidence in Brookhaven’s servers?”

  “Oh no,” he laughs. “It wasn’t that complicated. Rather it was the Freedom of Information Act. Visitor logs. It’s a government facility. Whoever visits is catalogued. That catalogue becomes a public record. Our dear friend, Dr. Wolf…” he points the glass at Bella. “Your Dr. Wolf, visited Brookhaven six times in a three month period.”

  “We never tracked him there.” Bella glances at Mack who, at the time, was in charge of the surveillance on the late scientist. “Europe, Asia, Canada,” she lists with her fingers, “but not Brookhaven.”

  “Au contraire,” Sir Spencer contradicts. “Your Mack here did know about Brookhaven. It was among the options we considered during our last adventure together. I recall mentioning it to you when we discussed Blogis’ successful foray in Toulon.”

  “I didn’t say we were unaware of the connection to Brookhaven. I’m just saying we don’t remember that we were certain he’d been there.” Bella looks down at the table, maybe trying to recall the conversation.

  “Well,” he counters, “we did discuss it. One can’t blame you for letting it slip from memory. You’ve had so much on your mind lately.”

  “We know, then,” I say, “Wolf gave them the process?”

  “We don’t know,” Sir Spencer says. “We can suppose he did. The logs are for the main entrance to the facility and not specific buildings.”

  “It’s too coincidental,” Bella says. “It has to be there.”

  “What is?” I ask.

  “I told you about Building 197, right? I mentioned what they do there? The research? That they partnered with Japan in the Super-Kamoiokande experiment? How all of it came back to Homestake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That Super-K project is part of T2K,” she says, “the project Blogis was helping get back on its feet.”

  “Very good, Bella,” Sir Spencer says. “Now that you’ve pieced together the puzzle, it seems you have a job to do.”

  “Do we?” I ask.

  “Oh yes,” Sir Spencer smiles. “I’ll give you Blogis. You give me whatever you find in Building 197.”

  CHAPTER 10

  My dad was a jack-of-all-trades and master of all tradecraft. Looking back, there really wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. He was a master marksman, he could catch, filet, and grill fish with one hand while changing the spark plugs in his car with the other. He was also a skilled boater.

  We didn’t own a boat, though we’d frequently rent one. Sometimes it’d be a simple johnboat for a day of fishing or a small ski boat for fun. Other times, he’d rent a nine-foot Lightning sailboat. He liked that class of boats because it was a challenging sail for one or two people and there was room for four in the cockpit. That meant ample room for the two of us, and my mom too, on the rare occasion she’d venture out on the water.

  There was a large lake, maybe an hour from our house. In the summer, when my dad wasn’t traveling, we’d go there a couple of times a month.

  Aside from our time at the gun range, it’s what my mom called “male bonding time.” My dad always laughed at that. He’d tell her he knew women who liked guns and boats. She’d giggle back and tell him she needed to meet those women. Dad would pull her close and say she already knew the most important one.

  When witness to it, I would suggest that what they were doing was “couple bonding time,” and I didn’t need to see it. That only pressed their flirtation into hyperdrive.

  They were, from a kid’s perspective, flawlessly happy. Aside from the occasional argument, which was pretty rare, they were always doting on each other.

  But my mom, sensing the importance of the time my dad spent with me alone, would give us space. Even when invited, she would most often decline.

  So she wasn’t with us the day I saw my first dead body.

  We were on a Lightning. The wind was calm and so there was no need for the spinnaker. There was barely use for the mainsail and jib. My dad was keeping them close-hauled. The sails were in tight and he was working as close to the direction of the wind as he could without pointing up directly into it. It was a tough job and he was a little frustrated. We were one of three boats on the water that day.

  He’d already tried reaching, which meant we were running perpendicular to the wind and he had the sails out as far as he could to capture the breezy gusts. It hadn’t worked well, so he’d employed the alternative strategy.

  “Why don’t we try running with the wind?” I asked. “You know, going with it instead of against it? That’ll give us speed.” I’d been reading a book about sailing and thought I’d impress him with my newly gained knowledge.

  “Been studying I see,” he smiled, the tension on his face easing a bit. “I’m impressed. That’s too dangerous with you on board though. We could accidentally jibe and you could get knocked into the water.”

  “I’m wearing a life vest.” I always did. I hated it. It was uncomfortable and uncool.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, one hand working the main sail and the other on the tiller.

  I moped, my shoulders drooping for effect, and looked off the port side of the boat, watching the small bubbling wake along the edge of the Lightning. My dad laughed at me. “You’re hilarious,” he said. “Trying to make me feel—” He stopped cold, which caught my attention.

  “Make you feel what?”

  “Hang on.” He looked past me, toward something in the distance, the tension returning to his face. “There’s something out there.” He took his hand from the line running the mainsail and pointed off the port bow.

  About two hundred yards away, halfway between our dinghy and the shore was a white and red object, bouncing with the roll of the lake’s surface. It looked a little like a buoy or marker of some kind. Our speed slowed as my dad navigated the boat toward the object.

  “What is that, Dad?”

  “I’m not sure yet, Jackson.” He leaned forward and squinted to get a better look. As we neared the object, it became increasingly clear it was something not meant to be floating in the middle of a lake. My dad put his hand on my back. “Jackson, I don’t want you to see this. Shift to the starboard side of the cockpit and look out that direction.”

  He was too late. I’d already figured out what it was.

  A man’s body: ghostly white, almost gray in appearance. He was bloated, bobbing face down, his red T-shirt clinging to his swollen back. It looked like someone had filled his body with too much air. He was a balloon about to pop.

  “I know it’s a body,” I told him, my eyes willing themselves to stay fixed on the aqua-corpse. “I know it’s a pers
on.” I turned to look at him, and the intensity in his face was replaced with sadness. I didn’t know then why he was sad. It was much later, in my counseling sessions, I’d understood he was lamenting a loss of innocence in his son. I was witnessing something no child should see. Childhood was about life, not death. That came soon enough. For me, that body was a warm-up for the death to come in my life.

  “Why does his body look like that?” I asked as we approached within twenty yards. “All puffy?”

  “It’s from gas. When someone drowns, they sink to the bottom pretty quickly. When the body decays, that causes gasses to build. Once there is enough gas, the body is lighter than the water and rises to the surface.”

  My dad pointed directly into the wind and the boat slowed to a stop, drifting with the slight movement of the lake water. The body remained close enough for me to study it, but far enough away it wouldn’t bump into the boat.

  “I’m going to call this in, Jackson,” he says. “We may have to wait here until police arrive.”

  “Okay.”

  Eventually, a sheriff’s boat pulled alongside us. My dad had anchored us, so we stayed out while they started their investigation. I’ll never forget the sight of two deputies pulling the man’s distended body from the water. It was, and is, the most disgusting image ever seared into my memory.

  Years later, in school, I wrote a fictionalized account of our discovery. I spent days researching what happened to a drowning victim, and made sure to include it in my essay.

  I imagined the man struggling for air, panicking as he realized those were his final moments. Then the blackness enveloped his eyes, the burning in his lungs stopped as they filled with water. That fresh, cool water pumping from his lungs into his bloodstream, diluting it rapidly so that it couldn’t carry oxygen. He was dead. His body, heavier than the water would sink as the pressure condensed the remaining gas in his lungs and abdomen.

  Once he hit the bottom, he stayed there for days or weeks, the fish or other freshwater creatures tasting his flesh, pecking at his eyes. Then the bacteria grew inside him as the decay intensified. Slowly those gases filled the cavities of his body until he became so light he slowly rose to the surface, emerging like a beach ball held under water too long.

  The teacher, a young woman only a couple of years in the profession, gave me an A minus. Her only comments at the top of the first page, written in red ink in that perfect cursive handwriting only teachers seem to have, were, VERY DARK!!

  If she only knew the half of it.

  The weird thing about seeing that body was that every time my dad took me out on the lake after that, I’d look for another one. I couldn’t help myself. I’d scan the horizon for anything bobbing up and down, anything bloated beyond recognition.

  It was almost as if I expected to see another “floater,” as my dad called it. Any second a body might bubble to the surface. It was bothersome and all-consuming at the same time.

  My dad sensed it too. He’d try to give me more responsibility on the boat to keep me occupied. I’d handle the tiller and the mainsail for stretches at a time. He’d let me run the spinnaker if the weather called for it.

  I started bringing binoculars. Every little white chop on the water was a potential discovery, another call to the sheriff, another glimpse at a life ended.

  “What are you doing?” my dad asked, likely aware of my preoccupation.

  I dropped the binoculars around my neck but kept my eyes on the water. “Nothing. Just looking for stuff.”

  “Bodies?”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I mean, it wasn’t normal to be so interested in death, was it? I didn’t want my dad to think less of me.

  “Jackson?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you looking for bodies?”

  I turned in the cockpit to face my dad. He cleated the mainsail line and wrapped his huge mitt of a hand around my knee.

  “I can’t help it,” I exhaled. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “I know,” he said, squeezing my knee enough to simulate a hug. “I’m the same way.”

  “Really?”

  “You’ve no idea,” he said. “I half expect to see death around every corner. I anticipate it. I understand.”

  I didn’t bother asking him why he expected to see death around every corner. At that age, I was so self-consumed and narcissistic I didn’t stop to consider why my dad, a traveling technology consultant, would worry about death. I should have asked.

  He probably wouldn’t have given me a straight answer. It’s not like he would have told me he was an assassin-for-hire, working with the nasty power brokers of the underworld and black markets.

  ***

  Planning to steal from a secure government facility is not as easy as movies would have you believe. The CIA isn’t going to let in a handful of firefighters with axes, as it did in Mission Impossible. Auric Goldfinger isn’t about to break into the U.S. Bullion Depository and render all of the gold radioactive and useless, as was his plan in the James Bond flick Goldfinger.

  But truth is stranger than fiction. Otherwise, a former military veteran never would have been able to race across the White House lawn, through the north entrance, past the staircase to the presidential residence, and into the East Room before being tackled. An armed felon with a history of assault never would have ridden on an elevator with President Obama and his security detail at, of all places, the Centers for Disease Control.

  So our plot seems reasonable as we coordinate the particulars in our third floor hotel room on F Street NW. It’s a sparse, two-star hotel in what’s called the Foggy Bottom area of the city. We’re not far from the Potomac or George Washington University.

  “Why did we choose this hotel?” asks Mack, slapping at a roach. “Are we low on money?”

  “I have my reasons,” I explain. “I’ve gotta make a call.”

  Bella has the lone chair pulled up to the bed, where she’s spread out the maps and blueprints. She’s taking notes.

  Mack is sitting on the small apartment sized refrigerator, mumbling to himself, rifling through the Wal-Mart backpacks.

  My call connects. “How quickly can you have them to me?” I ask.

  “I have them sent overnight,” says Wolodymyr, a Ukrainian friend of mine who is my closest connection to the black market. I haven’t talked to him since he helped Bella and me traipse across Europe undetected by border agents. “I get you sets of everything you need. Send to encrypted email please.”

  “Okay. It’ll come through a Gmail account. Look for it in within the hour.”

  “You got it, Jackson Quick,” Wolodymyr confirms. “Always happy to help my American friend. Everything I can do.”

  “There is something else…”

  “What is it?” he asks. “Good Cuban cigar? Nice Vodka? Ukrainian bride? I can do it.”

  “I know,” I laugh, “What can you tell me about Corkscrew?”

  “Corkscrew?” His voice drops with the seriousness of the question. “Are you on secure line?”

  “I’m on a burner. It’s not secure.”

  “Let me just say,” he clears his throat, “that is a very bad person.”

  “Why? You know Corkscrew?”

  “I know of Corkscrew,” he says softly, as if someone’s listening to us. “Corkscrew is what we hackers call a Black Hat.”

  “What is that?”

  “There are different breeds of hackers,” he says. “I’m like most. I’m Gray Hat. I do some good, some bad. It is in eye of beholder, yes?”

  “Okay.”

  “There are White Hats. They are goody two shoes. Hackers who only exploit systems and servers for good.”

  “So Black Hats are the bad guys. Like the Old West. The bad guys wear black hats.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Corkscrew does the bad things
. Most hackers use tools from open source. They get Metasploit or Subterfuge online, download it, and follow the directions. It’s like Easy Bake Oven for hacking.”

  “Corkscrew doesn’t do that?”

  “No,” he says, his voice still hushed. “Corkscrew created new LINUX distro and hacks with code from that. Super powerful. Super secure. Super smart.”

  “What’s a LINUX distro?”

  “LINUX is an operating system like Windows or Apple Yosemite,” he explains. “It provides bridge between hardware and software. But it is special.”

  “How so?”

  “LINUX was created in early 1990s by man named Linus,” he says. “He didn’t like people paying for operating systems. He created new one, called LINUX, and put its code on the internet for free. Anyone could see how it worked and make changes to fit what they needed. These are called ‘distributions’. It is distro for short.”

  “So Corkscrew created a unique version of LINUX just for hacking?” I’m getting it now.

  “All LINUX is good for hacking, some better than others. Corkscrew’s is the best. Better than BackTrack, and that is saying much.” He snorts a short laugh before catching himself. “Why you ask about Corkscrew?”

  “We may be working together.”

  “You kid me,” he says. “This is big joke, Jackson Quick?”

  “No.”

  “Be careful.”

  “What do you mean? We’re talking about a hacker, not a killer.”

  “Hackers are worse,” he says. “A killer ends your life, a hacker ruins it.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “If you contact Corkscrew,” he says, “do it from a computer and a connection that has nothing to do with you. Use an internet cafe or a library. Use an email account you don’t care about with a password you don’t use anywhere else.”

  “Why?”

  “Corkscrew doesn’t know you,” he says, “won’t trust you, and will try to dig into your system. You don’t want that.”

  “Have you ever dealt with Corkscrew?”

  “No. As good as I am at what I do, I’m not as good. Hackers like Corkscrew laugh at what I do.”