Midnight Empire Page 3

  He came back to the street further up the boulevard, took the first cross street away from the throng, walked into the zone of car parks and air-conditioning towers and traffic. Ten minutes later, he came to the door of his building, passkey in hand, and only when the loft’s door clicked behind him did he realise that the dress, the shopping bag, was no longer in his hand.

  The next morning, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he needed to sharpen his mind. He’d set his alarm for 5.30 a.m. so that he could witness a desert sunrise. He decided to run, get some exercise.

  He went east in the pre-dawn. The city looked fresh, quiet and clean. Long, cold shadows out of the hills, streetlights still shining, and soon he came to a suburb, cars facing pale streets, small houses in scattered lines, palm trees rising from a few front yards.

  The air was pure and his feet beat down. He took intersections randomly, jogged by garbage cans and children’s bicycles flopped sideways and a hula hoop in the middle of the road. There was the wire-hum of the power lines overhead. Not much activity on the streets—a few vans, a woman walking a dog, lights in the occasional kitchen, a man in a singlet staring into the dim.

  When the sun broke the crest of the hill he felt its warm light on his face. He started to feel a burn in his legs. Cars went by but on the streets there was hardly a soul.

  He crossed motorways and came to T-intersections and ventured down cul-de-sacs. He focused on his body, on a clarity of mind. The sky turned from darkest blue to light. A dog snarled at him through a fence while a child’s voice playfully called its name.

  Secular confessions. The idea of meeting the CIA made him uneasy. He didn’t understand why they wanted to interview him. He’d already been cleared top secret by the Australian Government, and the American DoD had informed LinkLock that that would be enough.

  He changed into a collared shirt and checked the adequacy of his shave.

  John Henderson buzzed at a minute past eleven, a man in his fifties with a moustache and wiry eyebrows, bifocals and a fair gut; sweaty. They sat at the lounge setting, Henderson with his briefcase open on the coffee table.

  ‘Australia,’ he said. ‘Now why would you leave it?’

  ‘Foolish, I suppose.’

  ‘What age are you?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘At twenty-six I was half as dumb. Are you married?’

  ‘Girlfriend.’

  ‘Burning the home fires?’

  ‘In Canberra.’

  ‘You’re an engineer?’

  ‘Communications.’

  ‘Networks.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So why am I here? You’re Australian and you’re technical. Should be a free pass.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What will you be doing at Creech?’

  ‘Encryption.’

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Technical.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I guess we ought to start.’ Henderson took a document and an audio recorder from the briefcase. ‘Takes about an hour,’ he said. ‘If I ask a question that you don’t understand, get me to explain it. If you understand it but want to know why it’s relevant, ask me why it’s relevant.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s routine, but answer honestly.’

  They began with his family. His father, Daniel said, was a banker, but not an investment banker, and he’d worked at the same bank for thirty years. His mother was a teacher. She worked with special-need students. His sister Jane lived in Gippsland, managing a farm with her husband on behalf of a Melbourne lawyer.

  His childhood had been nothing special, wet winters and dry summers and the things that children do.

  No, he’d never had a mental health problem. He’d never taken antidepressants and had no family history of schizophrenia.

  He’d never been in a fight. He’d never had a dispute with his employers, business partners or neighbours.

  He was not in debt. He had savings of thirty-four thousand Australian dollars, a Toyota worth eight thousand dollars and access to twenty-five thousand dollars on two credit cards.

  He rarely gambled.

  He knew two journalists, both friends of his girlfriend’s, but neither very well. He’d never written to a newspaper; had never even blogged.

  He’d never cheated on Hannah. She’d never cheated on him.

  He trusted her completely but he wasn’t the kind of person who had to tell his partner everything.

  He was not a homosexual.

  He had never had suicidal thoughts.

  In three words, he would say he was loyal, trustworthy and perceptive.

  He was not a paedophile.

  Hannah had no medical conditions. He had no medical conditions. They were not HIV positive; both had private health insurance.

  He drank most weekends. He’d never had a traffic accident.

  He had an Australian passport. As a tourist, he’d visited England, Spain, Germany and China (Hong Kong). He had no friends or acquaintances who were diplomats or who worked in Foreign Affairs. No friends living overseas. As far as he knew, his identity had never been stolen. He’d lost his wallet in his last year of high school but never since.

  Henderson paused for a moment, turned to a new section of the questionnaire and began to ask broader, more analytical questions.

  What was Daniel’s opinion of Islam?

  What did he think about America?

  Who did he believe was responsible for 9/11?

  Was the world headed in a good direction, or bad?

  Daniel said that he believed in liberty, in people’s right to do what they wanted to, without doing harm. He described himself as a scientist, a rationalist.

  He was a moral person even if he did not believe in God. He was not a pacifist, or at least he didn’t think so. He believed in justice, that there were such things as just wars.

  He could keep secrets. When told a secret, he felt no or very little compulsion to pass it on.

  He knew there was sometimes a difference between what he did and the right thing to do. He wasn’t vegetarian, for example, though he believed the argument that if there was no need to kill, one shouldn’t. He had once gone duck shooting but hadn’t hit anything.

  He knew that Henderson didn’t care about his opinions, was only interested in what they said about him. But the questions nevertheless stirred his thoughts, and when Henderson left—saying that Daniel would hear something from someone sometime—he found that his mind was still ticking, turning on some form of answer to give to Hannah.

  He wasn’t a great thinker, but he had heard it argued—and indeed he believed—that the world had reached a certain point: technology had superseded reason, and the time of the great individual (Alexander, Napoleon, Gandhi) channelling the will of the people had succumbed to the will of the individual over the mass. It was an intolerable situation, really, and it could lead only to chaos and death and all things turning to rubble. Was that why he had consented to come? he wondered. Could he tell Hannah he was here because it was vital to combat the individualist, the absolutist, the fundamentalist? Was he here to strike a blow for empathy, for reasoned thought? Was he here to fight all ideas, a man against belief?

  2

  Mythic horizons. They drove into the liquid road-shimmer of the desert, past the Joshua trees and the creosote bushes that bordered the I95.

  It was midday, the sun unforgiving. They drove at seventy miles an hour but it seemed slower, the effects of the desert; their perception of depth made strange, as if light itself had shortened. It was a terrain that felt planetary, the dry sink of an enormous Martian basin, a forever geology of heat and shale.

  Jake, who turned out to be rotund with a fat neck, had the radio on, rock station voices and advertisements one after the other, robbed of all but ritual meaning.

  They didn’t speak. A row of power poles passed like the trunks of long-dead trees, and they drove
by an abandoned excavator, its boom broken and rusting. There was traffic. The sedans of America. The hot pill of a horse float.

  The one structure they saw was a prison, blunt to the heat, a series of guard towers and concrete blocks a mile from the road.

  The hills were crumbling terraces of rock or megaliths of slow contour, peaks and outcrops hazing far away. Daniel wondered how anything at all went on in such a setting, why humanity had not taken one look at this place and moved on.

  Creech Air Force Base had three streets: First, Second and Third. It consisted of dozens of low buildings, some equipped with tinted windows and enormous air-conditioning units, while others were nothing but sheds. In front of these lay the airstrip itself: three intersecting bitumen runways, a series of concrete aprons, driving tracks; hangars in the distance.

  The southern edge of the base bordered the highway and the town of Indian Springs, population 1300—two gas stations, a post office, a park for mobile homes. Otherwise, the edges of the base were straight desert: shadscale and cheatgrass or white lengths of mineral and salt, a mountain range away to the north that rose out of the flat; climbs and peaks in distant series.

  Daniel was posted to a small communications hut, under the direct supervision of a man named Walter Gray. The hut sat at the eastern edge of the base, part of a cluster of small buildings: aircraft control stations and a multi-purpose briefing room.

  Gray worked for the CIA. Wearing sunglasses, he stood on the nearby apron with the enormous shape of a C-130 behind him, stark in the sunlight. Further on, parked in a hangar, Daniel made out the shape of what he knew to be a Reaper drone: the wingspan, the dome-shaped head, the eye below.

  The hut was packed tightly with various types of equipment, network appliances, routers and switches, cabling in thick lengths overhead and along the walls. Its construction suggested haste and transience, all plywood and steel frame. The air inside was noticeably dry.

  They sat outside it in the thin shade, facing north on fold-out chairs. A short distance away stood a large briefing hut, then three small control stations for the drones. Gray pointed to these and explained that the team, his pilots, were a special squad from the 432nd Wing. He was a man of about sixty, a sense of latent fitness to his body, a concave bend.

  ‘You start with an imperfection?’ he asked.

  ‘You create two diamonds. Each with the same mistake.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘The mistake is used in a transform function to set the key.

  The encryption works as usual, but the stream is one hundred per cent secure.’

  ‘I can’t break it?’

  ‘Theoretically you can break it. But you can’t do it by intercepting the keys. If you look at the keys, the system knows.’

  ‘What if I guess the key?’

  ‘The key changes. Every hour, every minute, with every packet that is transmitted, if you like.’

  Gray nodded. Daniel adjusted the position of his chair.

  ‘Well, this unit does things that are best encrypted,’ Gray said. He pointed towards the main gate and the central buildings, white in the sun. ‘That over there is the 432nd, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two hundred Predators, fifty Reapers thereabouts. But here, this is a small unit. A small number of dedicated Reapers. I can tell you’re a quiet kid. I don’t need to give you a speech. We aren’t under military command. I don’t need to say anything about secrets and what you’re going to learn.’

  Daniel remained silent.

  ‘Your equipment precedes you,’ Gray continued. ‘It’s in a storage locker in Building Seven, Third Street.’ He passed Daniel a key. ‘Tell me how this is going to work? What do you need?’

  He would need a Reaper drone. He would need a technician to show him its communications system. He would need a programmer who could change and commit a few lines of code. He would need half a rack of space for the main system in the hut behind them. He would need to issue instructions for whoever was going to install the LinkLock units into the Reapers at the bases in the Middle East.

  In the briefing hut they poured coffee from a pot, black stuff, sickly tasting when combined with UHT.

  The sound of a jet engine somewhere in a hanger, echoing hard.

  ‘The Taliban capture Predator feeds,’ said Gray. ‘Just a few. Just from time to time. They use laptops with satellite receivers and a Russian program for watching satellite TV. Mostly it’s of no real tactical value but it is highly annoying. The Pentagon certainly finds it disturbing. Satellite interception. It’s like dogs have learned how to talk. Hence, the arrival of you and your company and the technology you’ve produced. It’s overkill, naturally. The reason the drones aren’t already encrypted is NATO—we want the help of our allies but don’t want to share codes. We could install an off-the-shelf program at a tenth the cost, but the Taliban have provoked us. So the careful minds in the Pentagon have decided on diamonds. On the most advanced solution possible to protect our psyche.’

  ‘The contract is for twenty units,’ said Daniel. ‘And for my time, as long as I’m required.’

  ‘Overkill again,’ said Gray. ‘Expect to be here a long while. You’re in a loft?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Get you a car. There’s a shuttle but we’ll need you all hours, need you mobile.’

  Daniel went to the locker, walked past the 432nd, a building with tinted windows and a series of control centres, men in flight suits and women and men in green camouflage, walking.

  The equipment was all there. He locked the cage back up, stood for a moment. He felt weird, a fish out of water. He got back to the briefing hut to find that Gray wasn’t there. He took more coffee to the fold-out chairs and sat for a time.

  The drone, when he saw it, was flying in the high north, a trace and a flash of wingspan, sky-grey. It was difficult to size.

  Turning towards the base, just under the lip of the mountains, it seemed like something between a light plane and a remote-controlled toy, motions that were jagged, full of jerk. White lights on its wingtips, and when it came front on the shape was sinister: not a mindlessness but a type of inhabitation, alien, as if the drone were capable of speech and thought in an ancient machine-language with which you could never hope to reason.

  It came down fast, at first silently and then with a muted, choppy purr: the propeller seemingly uncalled for, ancillary, as if this was an invention that should fly by design alone.

  Lofting onto the runway, there was a single, sharp pinch as the wheels struck tarmac and the drone made a series of turns, finally shutting down on an apron where two men came out to it, wheeling a trolley.

  Daniel watched. Already it seemed something brazen, embryonic. Nascent of a future of primitive times.

  Each drone was controlled by two men, pilot and operator, who sat before adjacent consoles with keyboards, computer monitors and joysticks. Their displays showed flight data and maps of theatre, radar outputs and camera feeds: a low-resolution, front-facing sight; the various lenses—daylight, infra-red—attached to the eye, which could swivel below.

  Between pilot and operator was a further rack holding two seventeen-inch screens, what looked like radio equipment and additional controls. The light in the room came from two low-wattage lamps, halogen, set into the ceiling above each man.

  In the 432nd’s training facility Daniel sat with Gray and watched two pilots fly an MQ-1 Predator drone around the range north of Creech, high mountain and careening wind, a practice mission, observing the terrain, hunting for disturbances, piles of rock or shifts in earth.

  They dropped into the valleys to practise turns.

  ‘This is the fast track,’ Gray explained. ‘The pilots don’t bother so much with take-offs or landings. It’s more efficient to do those in theatre. Queue the planes up and switch control.’

  What made the most impression on Daniel was the silence. This was a realm of the purely visual, a total absence of tangible feedback. The map, the nose-cam, the radar disp
lays: each screen was a new means of seeing. They flew with overlays—flight heading, flight altitude, the artificial horizon.

  As he and Gray watched, the instructor simulated system failures, communication interruptions, sudden changes of direction, a breakdown of the autopilot. Demands were radioed by imaginary ground forces; there were flights over ridges to spot fire positions, infra-red scans for IEDs. The drone gave audible readings of its fuel level every quarter-hour, a synthetic voice speaking in numbers and ranges. At one point its cameras faced the sun and everything went white.

  The pilots had a workmanlike look. Gray told Daniel they were all veterans, usually Iraq, Afghanistan or both. The operator gave the drone commands via keyboard, into what appeared to be a rudimentary shell. There was no cursor blink, and Daniel could see there was sometimes a delay between strike and return, between command and acknowledgement, something he guessed would only be heightened once the drone was communicating by satellite from the far side of the world.

  Gray showed him pictures of his daughters. Did so stone-faced, drinking coffee and staring into the mountains. Cindy, a lawyer in Dallas, mergers and acquisitions, a woman with a straightforward intelligent look. The younger, Samantha, darker of mood, more beautiful, a part-time illustrator and school volunteer who lived in Brooklyn with a theatre producer who was Gray’s own age.

  ‘Cindy and I talk a lot,’ said Gray. ‘Her star is rising at the firm. But with Samantha it isn’t the same story. You can see she’s the brooding type. I was away for two years at the end of her schooling. When I return she thinks I’m a different person. She has this idea of me, this adolescent conception of me that isn’t right. She’s bunched me in with the establishment, the secret government that is deeply off-course. I figure she’ll grow out of it. But whatever it is sticks. I can’t even blame her mother, who on this matter charitably takes my side. I want to say to her, Look Sam, you might believe that the empire is evil but can’t there still be good people within it capable of making a stand? Several times this year I’ve arranged dinner for us, I want to carefully raise the topic, but this guy, the producer, always turns up. Of course I don’t like him. My daughter is young enough to be his daughter, and as far as I can tell he inherited both a theatre and a reputation from his father. In other words, I don’t find him impressive. I don’t know what she sees in him. We’re polite to one another but I give him hell with what I don’t say.’