The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [56]
Van had lost a personal fortune while working for the CCIAB, but there was no question that he was learning incredible stuff. The NSA was a mystery even to the people who worked inside it. Their secret spy feats were the stuff of distant, mist-shrouded legends.
Before their first spy satellites were ever launchable, American spies had used eavesdropping balloons. They’d sprayed toxic metal clouds into the sky that reflected Soviet radio signals from far over the horizon. Fewer and fewer government veterans still remembered any of this stuff. Huge bursts of top-secret ingenuity had just plain been forgotten. It had been nailed into wooden crates and lost inside some warehouse, like the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones.
The remote-control code that Van was now examining was a direct descendant of that mythical era. It wasn’t native computer code, it was space-machine code. His own grandfather had probably had something to do with developing this stuff, as he worked on that lost 1960s cruise missile. It was a living space-age fossil. It was code built entirely for electronic spying, electronic spacecraft, and electronic Cold Warfare. It had crept into the modern cyber-world like a digital trilobite.
Still, nobody had ever broken it, because the math behind it was rock-solid. So, Van and his clients in AFOXAR now faced the serious technical challenge of repurposing this satellite control code for use in aircraft. And not normal, everyday aircraft, either. Very fast, low-flying aircraft, stolen or hijacked, skimming the hilltops to stay off Air Force radar, as they zoomed toward the White House or Capitol with a bellyfull of terrorist explosives.
The likeliest engineering solution looked like a geosynchronous aircraft-control super-satellite somehow hooked into the satellite GPS system. This was a typically bloated Pentagon-style solution that would pull down sixty billion and take a generation to design, build, and implement. Van was hoping for something much quicker and quieter that might be delivered before he died of old age.
He figured the CCIAB’s best approach was to repeat a Grendel-style success. Make one working model as a proof-of-concept, and just install it somewhere in somebody’s jet. The AFOXAR guys were pressuring NASA and Boeing to get them a nice handy jet they could wreck. AFOXAR guys were a small gang of young engineers that nobody had heard of, but they didn’t brag much, they worked fast, and they were very can-do.
Van was in his tiny Vault office, deeply engrossed in this problem, when Fawn came swooning past his tangerine-colored cubicle divider. “Ohmigod, it’s him! He’s here. Elvis is here. Elvis is asking for you!”
“Who?” said Van. He was no longer even a little startled when Fawn said something apparently insane. Fawn Glickleister was not crazy. She was just so intensely bright that she cut into reality at a sharp angle.
“It’s that tall dark handsome dude with that secure briefcase strapped to his arm. He’s waiting out in the corridor, Van. He needs to consult with us!”
Van came to full alert. “That guy doesn’t look much like Elvis.”
“Well he’s Southern,” Fawn gushed. “He feels like Elvis. He’s just like Bill Clinton that way. Ohmigod, he is such a dreamboat, Van. He’s the hottest guy in the Vault.”
“What is it with you, Fawn? Get a grip.”
“Let’s investigate him!”
“Show him in here.” Van nodded. His code-wearied brain could use the break.
Elvis shouldered his