The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [21]
“TLA, as you know—Bob, pay attention at the back, there—was founded in 1979 by Ellis Billington and his partner Ritchie Martin. Ritchie was the software guy, Ellis the front man, which is why these days Ellis has a net worth of seventeen billion US dollars and Ritchie lives in a hippie commune in Oregon and refuses to deal with any unit of time he can’t schedule on a sundial.”
Angleton’s sallow visage is replaced (no dissolve, this time) by a photograph of Billington, in the usual stuffed-suit pose adopted by CEOs hoping to impress the Wall Street Journal. His smile reveals enough teeth to intimidate a megalodon and he’s in such good condition for a sixty-something executive that he’s probably got a portrait squirreled away in a high-security facility in New Mexico that gives people nightmares when they look at it.
“TLA originally competed in the relational database market with Ingres, Oracle, and the other seven dwarves, but rapidly discovered a lucrative sideline in federal systems—specifically the GTO5 market.”
Lots of government departments in the ’90s tried to save money by ordering their IT folks to buy only cheap, off-the-shelf software, or COTS. Which is to say, they finally got a clue that it’s cheaper to buy a word processor off the shelf than to pay a defense contractor to write one. After their initial expressions of shock and horror, the trough-guzzling, platinum-wrench defense contractors responded by making GTO editions—ostensibly commercial versions of their platinum-plated, government-oriented products, available to anyone who wanted to buy them—$500,000 word processors with MIL-SPEC encryption and a suite of handy document templates for rules of engagement, declarations of war, and issuing COTS contracts to defense contractors.
“TLA grew rapidly and among other things acquired Moonstone Metatechnology, who you may know of as one of the primary civilian contractors to the Black Chamber.”
Whoops. Now he’s definitely got my attention. The presentation cuts back to Angleton’s drawn-to-the-point-of-mummification face. He looks serious.
“Billington is from California. His parents are known to have been involved in the Order of the Silver Star at one point, although Billington himself claims to be Methodist. Whatever the truth, he has a stratospheric security clearance and his corporation designs scary things for an assortment of spooky departments, I’d reference CRYSTAL CENTURY if you were in London, but you can look it up later. For now, you can take it from me that Billington is a player.”
Now he throws in a fancy fade-to-right to show a rather old, grainy photograph of a ship . . . an oil-drilling ship? A tanker? Something like that. Whatever it is, it’s big and there’s something that looks like an oil rig amidships. (I like that word, “amidships.” It makes me sound as if I know what I’m talking about. I am to seagoing vessels pretty much what your grandmother is to Windows Vista.)
“This ship is the Hughes Glomar Explorer. Built for Summa Corporation—owned by Howard Hughes—for the CIA in the early 1970s, its official mission was to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It was mated with this—” another screen dissolve, to something that looks like a stainless steel wood-louse adrift at sea—“the HMB-1, Hughes Mining Barge, built by, you’ll be interested to know, Lockheed Missiles and Space.”
I lean forwards, barely noticing the duct tape holding my wrists and ankles against the chair. “That’s really neat,” I say admiringly. “Didn’t I see it in a Discovery Channel documentary?”
Angleton clears his throat. “If you’ve quite finished?” (How does he do that? I ask myself.) “Operation JENNIFER, the first attempt at recovering the submarine, was a partial success. I was there as a junior liaison under the reciprocal monitoring provisions of the Benthic Treaty. The CIA staff was . . . overly optimistic. To their credit, the Black Chamber refused to be drawn in, and to their credit, the other Signatory Party didn’t use more than the minimum