The Doodlebug War Read online

  Table of Contents

  By the same author:

  Prologue

  1 Frank Eats Dirt

  2 There’s No Place Like Home

  3 We Be in Trouble

  4 Frank Gets a Boy Friday

  5 Rain Date

  6 Tiger Team, Tiger Team, Burning Bright

  7 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

  8 Great Expectations

  9 (Don’t) Take the A Train

  10 Foobar’s Manifest Destiny

  11 To Catch a Thief

  12 Who? Me? Oh, Nothing

  13 My, How You Do Run On

  14 A-Camping I Will Go

  15 P.S. I Love You

  16 How Sick is that Doggie in the Window?

  17 Doodlebug, Doodlebug, Come out of your Hole

  18 Antlion Has Landed

  19 The Long and the Short of it

  20 Why Didn’t you just Say so the First Time?

  21 You Don’t Say!

  22 Man Doth not Live by Code Alone

  23 Now We’ll all just have to Sit Around and Wait

  24 It’s Showtime!

  25 Please Proceed to the Gate Area;Your Flight is Now Boarding

  26 We Interrupt this Program…

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  THE ALEXANDRIA PROJECT

  1 Meet Frank

  The Doodlebug War

  Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Updegrove. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: November 1, 2016

  Starboard Rock Press

  Marblehead, MA

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  [email protected]

  https://updegrove.wordpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-0-9964919-7-6

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  To my wife Kathy and my daughter Nora, with heartfelt

  thanks for everything they are and do

  By the same author:

  The Alexandria Project, a Tale of Treachery and Technology

  The Lafayette Campaign, a Tale of Deception and Elections

  Available in paperback and eBook at Amazon and in paperback on order through your favorite local book store

  Prologue

  It was, at last, time. His forces were ready, and his plans were well made.

  It was proper that America’s obsession with money and technology would provide the means for its own destruction. Its vulnerability was so obvious a child could see it.

  But the billionaire capitalists of the West would not see. Or perhaps they did and did not care. It made no difference—they worshiped profits above all else. The politicians they controlled with their campaign contributions knew better than to pass laws their masters would not like.

  He rose and walked to the entrance of the cave. The village in the valley far below lay peaceful and starlit, embraced by the snow-clad mountains. Not a single light or other sign of life could be seen.

  Just as America and Europe would soon appear to the doomed fools circling Earth in their absurd space station.

  1

  Frank Eats Dirt

  The phone was not ringing. Neither was the faint ching! of an incoming email interrupting the silence of his day. Even his Facebook page was devoid of likes and visits. After three weeks of waiting, there was no way to get around it: Frank Adversego, Cyber Eye, was an abject failure.

  He stared with regret at the website he’d built for his new venture. It really did look pretty cool—retro, with just the right Raymond Chandler vibe. And if forced to admit it, he thought he looked sharp in a fedora and trench coat, even if he had pixelated his face into a pink, mosaic blur.

  But a pretty web page did not a business make. He’d yet to land a single paying client. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t a clue how to advertise, and would rather subject himself to whole-body acupuncture than engage in face-to-face networking.

  But that was where things stood. There seemed to be no alternative to what appealed to him least of all: calling his old boss, George Marchand, to ask for work from the CIA. He scowled as he punched the buttons on his phone.

  “Hey, Frank, good to hear from you. How’s the new business coming along?”

  “Great! Having the time of my life! I can’t believe I waited so long to go into business for myself.”

  “Nice to hear, Frank. Couldn’t be happier for you. Of course, we’re sorry we can’t count on you anymore over here at the Agency. The challenges keep getting tougher—”

  “Oh, well, there’s no need to look at it that way! I’m sure I can take on a little more work from time to time if it would help you out. You know, fill in the gaps between the really big, interesting projects. Sometimes they go cold for a little while.”

  “Really? Well, that’s good to know.”

  Frank waited. There was only silence at the other end of the phone. “Uh, George, you got anything right now?”

  “Hmm. Maybe. But I don’t know if we have anything small enough to fit in between your really big, interesting projects.”

  Silence again.

  “Okay, George. Have it your way. Do you want me to beg?”

  Marchand laughed. “Of course not. I just couldn’t resist jerking your chain a little. Actually, I’ve been keeping my eye out for something to send your way and just came across a project that’s right up your alley. And at the same pay grade as before, too. You want to hear what I have in mind?”

  Frank uttered silent thanks to the patron saint of small businessmen. “Yes, George. I’d like that very much.”

  “Great. Got time to get together tomorrow?”

  “Today, tomorrow, you name it. The truth is, I’m not exactly overbooked.”

  “How about 10:00 tomorrow morning then. Do you still have the security app on your phone from your last project?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good. You know that doughnut shop in DuPont Circle?”

  “Sure, but what’s wrong with our usual coffee place?”

  “That’s enough for over the phone. See you there tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Frank was finishing his second doughnut when he spied Marchand approaching. He had the same authoritative, quick step as ever, but he looked a little stiff. And why not? It must be twenty-three years since they first met. Frank wondered whether he was secretly working for the CIA even then.

  His old boss spotted Frank and waved him outside.

  “Good to see you, George. Doughnut?”

  “No thanks. You better go easy on those, too, if you want to keep that weight off.”

  “Yeah, well, you picked the meeting place. What gives?”

  “Let’s talk while we walk. We’re going to a new facility we just opened up the street.”

  “Here? Pretty high-priced real estate for a government agency.”

  “No kidding. But data analysis is a hot skill now. We’re competing with shops like Google that coddle the kids fresh out of school like the
y were royalty. You need to offer frills like food courts and massage chairs to get the top talent these days. And if you don’t have a trendy location, forget it.”

  “What kind of work is the Agency doing there?”

  “This is our new ‘big data’ center. Every type of information we gather from all over the world will funnel through here now, so we can organize and then analyze it for trends and emerging threats.”

  “You mean, you’ve got tens of thousands of servers in the middle of Washington?”

  “No—they’re in a new data center outside the Beltway. But it’s all managed from downtown. Here. Clip this on your shirt pocket.”

  Frank followed Marchand into the sumptuous, travertine-walled lobby of a new office building. They fell in step with the other commuters streaming past the security guard and toward the elevators beyond. Marchand led Frank past them and around a corner, where they found one more elevator. Next to it was a small nameplate that read “Cloud Data, Inc.” He slid a card into a slot on the nameplate, and the doors slid open.

  “Private elevator?” Frank asked Marchand.

  “Of course.”

  To Frank’s surprise, they stopped on the next floor. Decanted into a narrow, windowless room, he found himself facing a wooden-faced guard sitting behind what looked to Frank like bulletproof glass. Marchand sat down in the first of a row of shallow stalls equipped with computer screens and set his phone in front of him. When prompted by an instruction on the screen, he typed in a number from his phone. Another line of text appeared on the screen, and he typed in an answer. Marchand sat still for a bit longer, and then a card popped out of a slit below the screen, as if he had just paid for his stay at an automated parking lot.

  “Your turn,” George said, nodding toward the booth. “Three-factor authentication.”

  Frank followed suit. Three-factor authentication meant he would need to pass three tests before being permitted to proceed further, the first involving something he had with him—clearly, the number from his own phone app. The second would be something only the person being tested would know—that would have been the response George typed in to the second line of text. The last would look for something known that was physically unique to Frank. He had expected only two-factor authentication, so he hadn’t been watching for a third procedure.

  He sat down and, when prompted, typed in the new six-digit number that had just cycled into view in the security app on his phone. He responded that his best friend from high school was named Jono. Then he waited to see what would happen next. A few seconds later, a penlight-sized light began glowing in the middle of the screen before swiftly moving up and stabilizing at his eye level, and he realized the retina in one of his eyes was being scanned.

  Apparently, he was who the CIA thought he was, because a moment later, his card popped out below the screen. He picked it up and noticed it had a computer chip embedded in it, presumably the same type found in the new EMV-enabled credit cards. He wondered by what means, and when, the CIA had succeeded in mapping his retina, as well as how much other information the Agency had ferreted out about his childhood without his knowledge.

  He stood up and joined George in front of one door in a line of unmarked doors. “These cards are only good for sixty seconds,” Marchand said, “so step right through your door when the green light goes on.”

  Marchand slid his card into a slot next to the door, and when the small light above it turned from red to green, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  Frank followed suit with his own door and found himself in a phone-booth-sized enclosure. The moment he closed the door behind him, he felt himself whooshing upward. Almost as soon as he finished accelerating, the process reversed itself, bringing him to an unexpectedly early halt. The door opened automatically, and he rejoined George in another narrow room, feeling as if he had just traveled halfway across the world via Harry Potter’s Floo Network.

  “Interesting commute.”

  “Yeah,” George responded. “We may be downtown, but this has to be as secure as headquarters. Drop your card in that box over there.”

  Frank noticed a wall rack filled with laptops and pointed to them. “Souvenirs?”

  “No such luck. Guest computers. You’ll have to put any electronics you’ve brought with you in one of those lockers over there until you leave. This place is an SCIV.”

  “SCIV?”

  “Sorry. It’s a ‘sensitive compartmentalized information facility.’ That means that all the information here stays here. None of the computer systems on-site are connected to the Internet, so there’s no remote access. If you want to work with any of the data here, you’ll have to do so on this floor, using one of those laptops. Notice anything odd about them?”

  Frank slid one out of its cubby and turned it around. “All the USB ports are plugged up.”

  “That’s right. That way nobody can take home any information on a thumb drive. Not that they could, anyway. When you enter and leave through that door there, you’ll be stepping through a metal detector sensitive enough to pick up the filings in your teeth. Don’t worry about that, though. Your dental records have already been entered into the system, the same as the magnetic resonance of the loaner laptops.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “You always were a quick study. Any other questions?”

  “So can I take notes on a pad of paper?”

  “Yes, but you won’t be able to take them with you. Like I said, nothing leaves here but you. We can’t vacuum out what’s in your brain, but that’s as much as you can take out with you.”

  Frank wondered whether they actually could vacuum out his brain, given all the other information the Agency seemed ready, willing, and able to acquire. But it was bad news about the note taking. He hadn’t had to work anywhere on-site since he left the Library of Congress. Stating that he wasn’t a people person would be as much of an understatement as observing that Freddy Krueger would make a poor babysitter.

  They stepped out into what Frank realized was an entire floor of the building, unbroken by walls from side to side and end to end. This was quite a switch from the anonymous cube farms he’d labored in for most of his career. There were no cubicles here at all; the whole space was populated by random islands of tables, couches, game tables, and exercise equipment—no, those were treadmill desks. Frank figured just the extreme sports posters on the walls would give a traditional spook apoplexy.

  He fell in step behind George, zigzagging his way through the expensive furniture draped with twenty-somethings wearing T-shirts and jeans, cradling their institutional laptops. Ahead was a glassed-in conference room tucked into a corner of the floor. Inside, Frank saw two people seated at opposite ends of a conference table; one was yet another anonymous youngster power-typing away on an ultra-thin notebook computer. The other, his rimless glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose, was poking away with his index fingers on the keyboard of a thick laptop with an oversized screen. A slack tie hung around the unbuttoned collar of his rumpled shirt, and a tonsure of disheveled hair crept around the back of his head like a wispy, white caterpillar.

  Marchand tapped on the door and let himself in. “Morning, Hermann. I don’t think you’ve met Frank before, have you? Frank, this is Hermann Koontz. He runs the show here.”

  Frank shook hands with Hermann as Marchand jerked a thumb at the scene outside the conference room. “Getting used to the new digs?”

  Koontz pushed his spectacles up on top of his head and scowled. “What do you expect? I feel like I’m running a frigging college rec center.”

  Unnoticed by Frank, the young man at the other end of the table was sizing Frank up with interest, noting he was middle-aged and unassuming with thinning hair and severely challenged when it came to fashion sense. He watched Frank stand awkwardly to the side with arms c
rossed, his body language indicating a strong desire to fade into the background—if that could somehow be arranged—as Marchand and Koontz chatted. Not exactly what he expected the guy who had saved the world from nuclear annihilation to look like, although it did appear that he kept himself in shape.

  Slattery stood up and approached him. “Hi. I’m Tim Slattery, Mr. Koontz’s assistant ethics officer.”

  Marchand overheard him and turned around. “Ah, yes, I heard we were adding one of those to every team.” He turned back to Koontz. “So—shall we get started?”

  Koontz picked up a remote control as they settled in around the table. Immediately the lights of the room dimmed, the glass walls turned opaque, and a hidden projector transformed one of the walls into a screen displaying multiple charts and tables.

  “All right. So the information I’m going to walk you through is culled from data we gather from every public and private source you can think of, and many you shouldn’t know exist. Telephone intercepts, email, social media, satellite photos, the works. Petabytes of new data every day, and exabytes in all. Then we analyze it using the latest neural network and machine-learning tools.”

  He turned to Frank. “How much do you know about big data?”

  “I’m pretty current at a conceptual level. But no hands-on experience, so no harm in dumbing it down a bit.”

  “Fair enough. So it wasn’t that long ago that we could pick up pretty high-level communications between terrorists from the field. We can almost never get that anymore, because the big fish know better than to use anything electronic. Now what we get is mostly low-level chatter, and when we do pick up something that sounds like it could be big, it’s tough to know how seriously to take it. For all we know, the stuff that seems most interesting was sent down the line just to throw us off. So we try to wring every bit of meaning we can out of the chatter, integrated with every other type of data we’re collecting. For that purpose, the more chatter, the better.