The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [138]
The deed was done and the program in place. Now what?
A rapid series of sharp beeps pulled him from his reverie. From a holder clipped to his belt, Ritter drew his secure phone. CALL WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR APARTMENT, read the message in its bright orange screen. No greeting. No name. No need.
Back in the ‘20s, the forty-sixth U.S. president, Edwina Locke, had blown a fuse when a delicate private conversation with her teenage daughter was posted word for word on the Web, years before the Internet rules changed. With the virtual disappearance of landlines and increased sophistication of electronic eavesdropping, it had become impossible to guarantee privacy with portable devices working on the cellular network. President Locke had scoured MIT and Caltech for unorthodox brains and shanghaied them into a think tank accountable only to the White House. Soon dubbed EBD, or Edwina’s Boffin Department, by security directors, she tasked her group to develop a system of secure communications for high-ranking government officers. The group discovered that such a system existed, developed and run by the army. When the military stonewalled the EBD, Locke tore a broad strip from a four-star general’s hide and forced him to release the technology. Thus the SSC1, or Secure Squirt Communication equipment, became an essential accessory for high-ranking civil servants.
Shaped like a thin cellular phone, the SSC 11×7 in Ritter’s hand was the latest model of a pager—useless as a regular phone, and devoid of popular gadgets such as a 3-D screen or theta-wave relax, but so secure that after thirty years it remained hacker-proof to anyone but the NSA, who kept the keys.
When the user spoke, the device identified, compressed, and encrypted each word, to squirt it as a pulse lasting nanoseconds in the pauses between sounds. The receiver could read remarkably crisp plain text on a screen barely larger than a wristwatch and in the top left-hand corner a three-digit number identified the caller. An iris scan and a devilish DNA comparer prevented unauthorized use.
Ritter glanced through the darkened side windows as they crossed Florida Avenue, five minutes from his apartment at Mason Tower. On the corner of Brentwood Road, he caught sight of Enzo Semprini, closing his fruit shop for the day.
After the 2026 building act allowing construction higher than the Capitol in Washington, D.C., scores of high-rise buildings had forever changed the capital’s image. Washington boasted several buildings with high-security ratings, but none like Mason Tower. The condominium had been privately built back in the ‘30s and all its residents were government employees. In a bid to guarantee protection at reasonable costs, federal agencies encouraged their more sensitive personnel to move into a secure property. Those who couldn’t be convinced to take up an address at a secure condominium required expensive twenty-four-hour protection by a rotating team of bodyguards, which put an incredible strain on the system. Genia Warren was one of those who had refused to leave her family home in Galesville, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay.
Soon Ritter’s motorcade reached the approaches to the building—a vast rotunda with synthetic lawn and a flagstaff at its center. Instead of approaching the main door at street level, they continued down a circular ramp sinking under the building. Two floors underground, the ramp leveled and straightened into a clear three-hundred-foot stretch, ending in a burnished steel wall, which blocked further progress.
The two-car motorcade had slowed to a standstill, the front car only a few yards from the gleaming wall, when a low-frequency thump echoed from behind.
Ritter ignored the noise, adjusted his beret, and reached for the suitcase as the windows lowered. He knew that another wall of three-inch-thick steel had dropped behind them, to isolate them from the rest of the world while sensors ran inside and outside the vehicles.
When