say he did, would he have gone to Mexico?”
He thought, and said, “Yes.”
“Would you have come and helped him, if he’d called, using whatever means were at your disposal?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. I would have.”
“Then what the hell are we talking about?”
Pike closed his eyes for a moment. “You really twist up what I’m thinking.”
She squeezed his hand and said, “No I don’t. Others are doing that. And you know it.”
He let go of her hand and put the car in drive, saying nothing. She said, “You know that, right? I wouldn’t stay if I thought what you said was true.”
He said, “I know. It’s just that we can’t be pulling shit like this. The other times you mentioned were for national security. Averting risks to our nation, not something personal like this. It was wrong.”
She said, “Listen to the tape. I don’t think it’s just personal. I think it’s a Taskforce problem. Something bad’s going on, and I think it affects national interests.”
As she pulled out the recorder he said, “Jennifer, drugs might be a national problem, but they’re not Taskforce business. There’s a whole agency dedicated to that.”
She said, “Just listen. Jack might have been working on the cartels, but he found something different. There’s an American on here talking about something much bigger than drugs.”
“What?”
“Our GPS constellation.”
19
N ot for the first time, Arthur Booth considered bringing mittens with him to work. The temperature inside his trailer was damn near freezing due to the number of servers, and it wasn’t like he was going to be banging away on a keyboard any time soon. Well, unless there was an anomaly in the system, which had happened only a few times since the Air Force officially accepted the latest upgrade to the GPS Architecture Evolution Plan.
Located behind the wire on one of the largest secure areas within the Department of Defense, the trailer was nowhere near as nice as the control room it supported two hundred meters away, but it was supposed to be temporary, and anything beyond the barest of requirements was a waste of money in the eyes of the defense contractor that maintained it.
Boeing had won the bid to create the next-generation Global Positioning System and had been working nonstop for over a decade to implement it. Designed to replace the aging, monolithic mainframes with a distributed network, along with launching more robust and capable satellites into space, it was an enormous undertaking that had to be accomplished seamlessly. Sort of like upgrading a propeller aircraft to a jet-capable one—while the aircraft continued to fly. Given the criticality of the system, it couldn’t be treated like cable TV, where the United States could tell the world, “Sorry for the inconvenience, but GPS will be experiencing some unpredictable outages over the next ten years. . . .”
And so Boeing built the system with robust backups, monitoring the architecture on a twenty-four/seven clock. The new AEP operational control segment at Schriever Air Force Base was fully functional now, monitoring the health of the global constellation of satellites, and Boeing, using Booth’s station, monitored the health of the control segment, reacting to any anomaly it found.
Booth, however, was watching for a very different reason. He
wanted
an anomaly. Wanted official access to the control segment. Wanted to be able to ostensibly solve a problem while introducing a new one.
Booth was a hacker and always had been, although he would say he was of the breed known as “ethical.” With ethics being decidedly in the eye of the beholder. He never compromised systems for financial gain, like eastern European Mafia groups, or for general mayhem, like a high school script kiddie defacing a pop star’s website. He only hacked for what he perceived as the greater good, exposing corporations and government evil, as it were.
Hacking, in and of itself, was
He thought, and said, “Yes.”
“Would you have come and helped him, if he’d called, using whatever means were at your disposal?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. I would have.”
“Then what the hell are we talking about?”
Pike closed his eyes for a moment. “You really twist up what I’m thinking.”
She squeezed his hand and said, “No I don’t. Others are doing that. And you know it.”
He let go of her hand and put the car in drive, saying nothing. She said, “You know that, right? I wouldn’t stay if I thought what you said was true.”
He said, “I know. It’s just that we can’t be pulling shit like this. The other times you mentioned were for national security. Averting risks to our nation, not something personal like this. It was wrong.”
She said, “Listen to the tape. I don’t think it’s just personal. I think it’s a Taskforce problem. Something bad’s going on, and I think it affects national interests.”
As she pulled out the recorder he said, “Jennifer, drugs might be a national problem, but they’re not Taskforce business. There’s a whole agency dedicated to that.”
She said, “Just listen. Jack might have been working on the cartels, but he found something different. There’s an American on here talking about something much bigger than drugs.”
“What?”
“Our GPS constellation.”
19
N ot for the first time, Arthur Booth considered bringing mittens with him to work. The temperature inside his trailer was damn near freezing due to the number of servers, and it wasn’t like he was going to be banging away on a keyboard any time soon. Well, unless there was an anomaly in the system, which had happened only a few times since the Air Force officially accepted the latest upgrade to the GPS Architecture Evolution Plan.
Located behind the wire on one of the largest secure areas within the Department of Defense, the trailer was nowhere near as nice as the control room it supported two hundred meters away, but it was supposed to be temporary, and anything beyond the barest of requirements was a waste of money in the eyes of the defense contractor that maintained it.
Boeing had won the bid to create the next-generation Global Positioning System and had been working nonstop for over a decade to implement it. Designed to replace the aging, monolithic mainframes with a distributed network, along with launching more robust and capable satellites into space, it was an enormous undertaking that had to be accomplished seamlessly. Sort of like upgrading a propeller aircraft to a jet-capable one—while the aircraft continued to fly. Given the criticality of the system, it couldn’t be treated like cable TV, where the United States could tell the world, “Sorry for the inconvenience, but GPS will be experiencing some unpredictable outages over the next ten years. . . .”
And so Boeing built the system with robust backups, monitoring the architecture on a twenty-four/seven clock. The new AEP operational control segment at Schriever Air Force Base was fully functional now, monitoring the health of the global constellation of satellites, and Boeing, using Booth’s station, monitored the health of the control segment, reacting to any anomaly it found.
Booth, however, was watching for a very different reason. He
wanted
an anomaly. Wanted official access to the control segment. Wanted to be able to ostensibly solve a problem while introducing a new one.
Booth was a hacker and always had been, although he would say he was of the breed known as “ethical.” With ethics being decidedly in the eye of the beholder. He never compromised systems for financial gain, like eastern European Mafia groups, or for general mayhem, like a high school script kiddie defacing a pop star’s website. He only hacked for what he perceived as the greater good, exposing corporations and government evil, as it were.
Hacking, in and of itself, was
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