CHAPTER 55
Fort Meade, Maryland
The headquarters of the National Security Agency are hidden in plain sight, but the inner workings of that government institution are just plain hidden.
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway south of Baltimore has signs directing AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY to the NSA complex, but there are no visitor rooms or facility tours on-site like those offered at the Smithsonian or the Capitol or even the FBI.
Multiple defense screening systems protect the facility from external threats, while internal protocols make the interior virtually impenetrable by anyone without a need to know. Every room is equipped with alphanumeric placards that monitor the multiple cyber and biometric locks on every door.
The formidable fortifications of the manmade iceberg are mirrored in multiples beneath the surface of the Maryland countryside, where operations remain in full swing every hour of every day throughout every week, month, and year.
The long and short of it? We, the good guys, can monitor almost every piece of information that gets digitally passed around the world. Phone calls, emails, even encrypted communications can be tagged for further scrutiny if they pose a potential threat to our national security.
How it all happens or precisely what they can see and hear was beyond me, of course. All I knew was that somewhere about five stories below the parking lot existed a room where really smart people watched, read, and listened for blips in cyberspace.
And it was one of those subterranean eggheads who caught a glimpse of a blip that had originated a few miles off the coast of Nantucket. Whatever triggered the blip was enough to alert a team of analysts, hackers, and algorithm wizards to focus all their efforts on tracking the anomaly.
Whoever was going to receive the electrons racing through the atmosphere was no dummy.
Apparently, the signal was bouncing around from London to Hong Kong and everywhere in between.
Some complex system of loops and retransmission sites had been staged for this specific piece of digital information to pass from sender to receiver.
It wasn’t impossible to track its journey, but it was almost impossible to pinpoint its final destination: The relays happened in a tenth of a second before traversing the heart of Europe and Asia.
At least, that’s what Tristan told me when I got him on the phone. All the good guys knew was where it had originated and where it was heading. They had no idea of its content.
That, unfortunately, was the intelligence they were looking to us to provide.