Chapter 61
Huntsville, Alabama
Temporary FBI Headquarters
Monday
11:45 p.m. Central Time
“We had the body and the space suit rushed here over the weekend. With the mass blackout in D.C. and all the chaos, coming here to the temporary HQ made the most sense.” Dr. Ginny Banks stood next to the medical examiner and the FBI computer forensics expert Vineet Mathur. Special Agent Toby Montgomery watched and listened cautiously. He had about decided he could trust Dr. Banks, but from his past experience, full trust was hard to give to anyone.
“So, why are we here?” Toby asked.
“First, man, this space suit is sweet,” Vineet said. “It has a computer network running all through it and there’s some sort of wireless control system that runs it.”
“Wireless?” Toby asked.
“Yeah, the actual control computer isn’t part of the space suit. Well, it is, and it isn’t,” Vineet said excitedly. “This is beyond state-of-the-art stuff here.”
“What is?” Toby prodded the scientist along.
“It took me a bit, but once we powered on the suit, I realized the helmet visor was smart-glass.” Vineet pointed at the faceplate on the helmet he was holding up in his hands. “It’s so encrypted we’ll never hack it. But that’s not the important part.”
“Never hack it?”
“I have put some assets at the Agency on it and Dr. Grayson is setting up a program to run it through Bumblehive, but for now, it doesn’t look like even the U.S. intelligence community has the ability to break this encryption,” Ginny added. Toby just nodded in understanding.
“Yeah, but the big thing here is, how on Earth was this guy controlling the virtual glass?” Vineet shrugged with his palms upward. Then he nodded to the medical examiner. “That was the big question. Show him, Doc.”
The medical examiner, Dr. Michon Smith—Toby wondered if that was her real name, but decided it probably was and put his undercover agent paranoia aside for the moment—smiled at him with a raised eyebrow. Then she pulled the cover back from the dead man’s head.
“Sorry for the gruesome nature of this. Per the report, he was indeed killed by a high-temperature flare being fired into his face. There was little left there. Fortunately, he didn’t burn up because of being in the vacuum of space. Had it not been for that, there would have been nothing to see here,” Dr. Smith explained. “The first thing we did was a full course of X-rays of the body.”
“We did the suit too,” Dr. Banks added.
“Special Agent, you simply can’t grasp how dope this suit is,” Vineet interrupted. “The Space Force guys want it back as soon as the investigation is over so they can reverse engineer it.”
“What did the X-rays show, Dr. Smith?” Toby was getting impatient for the punch line.
“They showed this.” She pointed at the X-ray display screen across the room. “D’ya see these white spots here and here on either side of his ears?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we pulled one of them.” She turned the dead man’s head over and pointed out the incision point behind his left ear. “It was some sort of magnetic implant.”
“It was a neural link implant!” Vineet couldn’t help himself.
“A what?”
“This guy was talking to his space suit, and probably other people, through a brain-to-machine interface. This is stuff DARPA has been working on for years. NASA wishes they could have a suit like this. I bet he could fire his jets about just by thinking commands.” Vineet was all the while waving his arms about and pointing and acting like a geek at a computer expo.
“Wait a minute.” Toby had to think that through a minute. “You are telling me that our bad guys have implants behind the ears that allow them to control their space suits with their brains. You mean literally by thinking control commands to it?”
“Well, without being able to hack into it we’ll never know how complex the system was. But even if there were just virtual buttons, a virtual keyboard, or a virtual mouse or something, they could just think of pressing the keys or buttons or moving the mouse to control it like any other computer. That is still, well, a decade away for us?” Vineet explained. “I’ve never seen anything like it other than in science fiction.”
“I have requested access to programs regarding this type of technology at all classification levels,” Banks added. “Nothing back yet.”
“Okay, so why behind the ears?” Toby asked.
“Aha!” Dr. Smith clapped her hands together. “I thought you would never ask.”
“So, you do know why?”
“I have an idea,” she said. “I looked more closely at the skin of the other ear without disturbing it. Under the microscope you can see here there is a depression in the skin and fatty tissue indicative of someone who wears glasses regularly. Unfortunately, there was only one eyeball left and it was damaged too badly to test the man’s visual acuity. However, it is my hypothesis that the reason the implants are magnetic is that they hold glasses in place.”
“The implants could be using a magnetic induction process to connect to a pair of virtual display glasses,” Vineet said. “They might have glasses they can wear around that work like the space helmet does.”
“Why would somebody want that?”
“Communications, sensor network data, because it is cool—hell, there are all sorts of reasons I’d want them.” Vineet grinned. “I mean, that is some real sci-fi shit, Special Agent. Who knows what advantages it would give you? You could cheat at almost anything with them.”
“Okay, glasses then—” Toby started but was interrupted by Dr. Banks.
“Toby, can we speak in private a moment?” She held up a blue neoprene locked bag about the size of a large legal envelope. “In a secure area.”
“Okay, sure.” Toby turned to Vineet and the doctor. “Great work. Let me know if you find anything else.”
* * *
“Airman First Class Shannon continued to look for a way out of Russia that Lytokov could have taken the nukes. She took the challenge Frank gave her seriously,” Banks explained as she unlocked the bag and pulled an envelope marked TOP SECRET from it.
“So, she found something?”
“Yes, she did.” Banks nodded. “There is an oil pipeline that runs all the way to the Black Sea there. The line has a security and maintenance road running alongside it with controlled access. It was the perfect egress route.”
“We know for sure this is how they got the nukes out?” Toby asked.
“Yes. Dr. Grayson put the full might of the Bumblehive on it and managed to hack into the security cameras along the path. Look here in these pictures. Here are guys in these vehicles here. We know it’s them from this one.” Banks shuffled to the next printout. It was a picture through the windshield of two men. The man in the passenger seat was Lytokov. Both men were wearing sunglasses.
“Damned good thing the power in Utah wasn’t knocked out, then. Have you shown this to Frank yet?” Toby asked.
“No. He should be landing in Tampa soon.” Banks then pointed at the glasses. “Notice these?”
“Yes. I do.” Toby agreed.
* * *
“That’s it, Vineet. Can you print that out for me and send it to the evidence folder?” Toby and Ginny had watched as the computer wizard white hat hacked the Pentagon security gate cameras and scrolled back through the previous week.
“Will do. Do you want my algorithm to keep looking for others with sunglasses as they entered or what?”
“Only those connected to the Joint Chiefs and this investigation. Any more than that and we’ll likely have a problem with the FISA judge.” Toby turned to Banks and grinned. “We got the bastard. Let’s go get a warrant.”
“It would be nice to actually get a pair of those so I can reverse hack ’em,” Vineet added. “I’m just sayin’. It would be nice.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” Toby replied.