Globall War of Terror: Dying Is Easy, Living Is Hard

FICTION

Globall War Of Terror - Dying Is Easy, Living Is Hard


from _History Of The Tyranny_
United California Colleges, 2031

"For the sin we do two by two, we scream for one by one
And may the God you took from a printed book be with you, [Echo 18]." -- adapted from "Tomlinson" by Rudyard Kipling, found written in blood on the wall of a Homeland interrogation cell, San Jose Operations Office

Post Firecracker

The bus ride back to campus gave me time to think about our next steps.

Our campus was a ship in a stormy sea, the ruins of the Bay Area after careless atomic pest control deprived San Francisco of any love. We had a rudder - the Site Location Executive, who worked tirelessly to maintain our contracts and keep the engineers coding. We had an engine - the employees. What we lacked was navigation. Seeing what was around us so that we could avoid the rocks, shoals, reefs and sharks.

So far to the extent we had an organic intelligence capability, I had been it. I had done most of the work myself and delegated tasks as I could to my staff, often without explanation.

For example, I'd established a radio listening watch using old HAM equipment and off the shelf police scanners in the new Security Office. In between other work, dispatchers and guards on light duty (usually medical) listened to different frequencies and took notes. I insisted that these be on paper and stay in the office.

Mostly they discovered that Homeland and the various criminal syndicates, including our attackers when the convoy arrived, were using encrypted radios with spread spectrum capabilities. Not much we can do with that. But with the right equipment and a dedicated person to listen, we could in theory do both ELINT and traffic analysis. Possibly even early warning. But not yet.

I'd identified a suitable space for storage. The Files Storage Room was on an upper floor, well inside the building and lacking windows. It had been built as extra storage space and was not really suited for use as an office. I had personally installed an obscure high security lock, different from the campus system, on the one door. There were only two keys - one I carried on my person, one in the Emergency Key Locker. Since I'd made the copy, the one in the Emergency Key Locker did not work. If you made it through the door, you were confronted with piles of cardboard boxes - the contents of our old COMPANY offices, not yet filed or sorted, which included live personnel files (and therefore potential blackmail information) but also a lot of other trivia. You had to know to turn right, then left again, to reach a 14' by 20' open space, lined with mismatching tables and containing four rolling chairs.

The space was alarmed with both volumetric and perimeter alarms monitored by Dispatch. If the alarm went off, I had to personally come and investigate and clear the alarm, every time. This was a feature not a bug. There were six ways to get to the door from other parts of the building without going past an interior camera. Also a feature.

The walls of the open space were covered in what paper maps I had been able to obtain. Remaining wall space was all whiteboards. Most of the information on the whiteboards was in my handwriting. I wanted that detail to be really obvious to a potential investigator.

I had assembled a small library of books and a few pages of carefully selected printed and handwritten references. Other materials had to wait. On the excuse that we would be sorting through the recovered COMPANY files, I'd also snuck in two locking file cabinets with matching padlocks on yet a third key system. Those keys were under the cabinets, which I had filled with papers before putting tell-tales on the drawers.

While working in the room, I'd brought in a 8' ladder stolen from Facilities and investigated the dropped ceiling. I wanted to make sure there was nothing I didn't recognize lurking up there. I disconnected the smoke alarm, the PA system speaker and the fire alarm annunicator -- all arguably illegal. I made sure during testing that the PA and fire alarm could still be heard from outside the room. The ladder was still in there for future work.

I'd also ripped out the single telephone connection in the room. No one had ever wired it for network connectivity. This was also a feature.

So much for the physical amenities. What I really needed was people to help me out. I was acting as my own Intelligence Officer, which required me to maintain as close to encyclopedic knowledge of the people, the campus and the current condition of the Bay Area - without news media or Internet or much beyond. We had a copy of Wikipedia running on the local network, which is better than nothing.

Oh, we had propaganda. Lots of that. Legal One had managed to keep himself in the US by joining the Military District as a censor. Someone had pointed out his name on an approval line that appeared accidentally on a press release. [Oliver Stone] in fact. Poor guy. I could really use [Stone]'s help now except that 1) he's a coder and therefore should be coding so we keep the contracts, 2) I couldn't trust him, and 3) I'd had to disappear him for his inability to keep his mouth shut.

Propaganda assured us that we were winning the war and starting to recover. But it provided little useful information.

We didn't know from day to day the safest route to the main police checkpoint in Morgan Hill that controlled access to points south. We drove it and found out, every time, and that cost time and gas and sometimes ammo and once in a while lives.

For intelligence gathering I'd implemented a kludgy help desk based system for interactions between the campus and the Security department. The automated system would let anyone with computer access - contractors, employees, etc - open a ticket with reports, observations and requests. It built on existing help desk facility maintenance tickets and quickly took on a life of its own.

A food gathering expedition had to get a "Off Campus Trip Permit" before departure, specifying entry and exit locations and times. We had to approve it and would try to provide protection for it if we could. If they didn't come back, we would at least know who had left - and a ticket left open would trigger investigation and at least an attempt at a search. If they did come back, the ticket could only be closed by proving it (compare to access card logs) and by filling in a form reporting any observations. Employees would use their own computers. Contractors could also use one of the two shared uses computer labs.

Convoy drivers were given line maps of our intended routes. On return to site they would complete ticket based "Trip Reports" with mileage, vehicle condition and observations. Lookouts would also file tickets both to document their shift and then for any special events or observations. The primary method of access to these for guards was WiFi enabled cell phone browsers.

Security supervisors and dispatchers and CLIENT managers had access not only to enter tickets but to view them. It wasn't very secure but it was better than nothing. This allowed our observations to be quickly searched. But I was very short on analysts to actually do the searching. I had drafted supervisors and dispatchers to help in their spare time, but we didn't have much of that.

On the roof of H5 Executive we had established an observation post. It was equipped with very powerful long-distance cameras supported by a team of five trained observers. (Observer training is halfway to sniper training.) I'd borrowed one of their cameras for the successful recovery of our colo facility in Santa Clara. I'd even returned it. These were backed up by the best telescopes we could easily lay hands on.

They didn't file tickets. They recorded their observations in a paper logbook which I read at least once a day, often more, and as necessary entered observation tickets for. I didn't want people knowing just how good our optics were. I really didn't want people knowing that we could, if necessary, zoom so far into windows that we could read documents lying on people's desks. But that was another drain on my time and a hole in our observation capability if I were off campus - a hole that would become permanent if I were killed.

Dispatch could view their cameras and take screen shots, but we didn't have the DVR space to keep such large video files on the fly, just in case we might need it. If a dispatcher saw something and hit the CAPTURE button, we had it. If not, not.

The very best intelligence, the gold standard, is always HUMINT or Human Intelligence. But that requires maintaining a network of agents. And I was the only person running agents. I would recruit them, give them cursory training, and set up both live and dead drops as appropriate. But that work came out of my sleep. And I had no backups. If the agent learned something and had to let me know, there would be that time lag. We needed a dedicated person who would do nothing but run agents, preferably with no one knowing who that was.

What I needed was a lot of help. But what I had was a contract security department budgeted before the Firecracker for about 1000 hours of service, or 25 full time employees (FTE). Now I was running more than double that. Six days a week, 13 hours a day gives you 78 hours per week or almost two FTE, at the expense of running people ragged. And tired people make mistakes.

A fully staffed intelligence support unit would have a dedicated Intelligence Officer in charge, two or three full time analysts, a full time HUMINT officer, an internal investigator and dedicated IT support. But I simply didn't have the people, either the skillage or the time. Unless I cheated.

So I did. Taking notes only in my head, I made a plan and refined it again and again. What I finally came up with was ugly, but it could be made to work. But I would need to be able to trust each person completely.

I would have to keep the Intelligence Officer spot, but I would need to train two of my more promising supervisors in that direction. That meant Sarah, one of my two night supervisors and Sharon, one of my swing shift supervisors.

I would completely compartmentalize the internal investigations function. Not only was it normally a CLIENT internal matter, but we had been blessed and/or cursed with Major Cartwright from Utah as the nominal client security manager. My relationship with him was simple but fraught: he let me do whatever I wanted and stopped trying to kill me, so I let him live. He now rarely left his office in H4, just down the hall from the Site Location Executive, and spent most of his time on internal employee investigations anyway. I didn't want him knowing anything about intelligence operations. If he needed to know something, I would tell him. If I needed to get something out of him, I would find a way. But I trusted him as far as I could throw him, and liked him less.

This was complicated by the fact that in a big company, some managers steal and a few managers steal a lot. We were in an internal political war - almost literally - with the Reno office. As part of keeping the site going, I'd started a sideline business, [Echo 18] Sundries, selling worthless crap at much higher than cost to the employees. This made it look like I had my hand in the till, and was called the "PX Scam" according to two of my informants. This made me approachable and I'd learned all sorts of things. But as long as the company was a going entity, we could keep 3500 people alive in the midst of madness. That made skimming and spreadsheet skulduggery of little interest to me by comparison - and Cartwright's bread and butter and a little off the top for him, too.

Sarah Stewart of [XYZ] Security Technologies had been very unlucky at the start of the Firecracker War. A swing shift supervisor, she had survived (barely) the takeover of her site, for values of not actually dead, until our raid on the colo facility. Afterwards I'd hired her and put her to work, but for various reasons including PTSD not at her old site.

Her coworker Wyatt, a control room operator (you're not a dispatcher when there's nothing to dispatch), might or might not have been luckier. He was shot in the leg and hid under the raised floor without the knowledge of the attackers. In between rapes, Sarah brought him water, which kept him alive. After rescuing him, we'd transported him back to campus and managed to save his life, but not his leg - the gangrene was too advanced and the vet surgeon had taken it off just below the knee. He was presently working in dispatch for us.

Sharon on the other hand had been a swing shift guard eager for advancement, attending college during day shift. She'd re-entered college after a nasty divorce, no kids, but in the meantime needed money. Her ex-husband had been working in South San Francisco on Firecracker Day. If he was lucky, he was killed instantly - but more likely burned to death while suffering from massive radiation injuries. Trapped between two nuclear detonations and the resulting Daly City Fire, we had not heard of anyone who had gotten out of that city. Sharon's reaction: "Bastard deserved it." And from what I'd heard, probably correct.

I needed competence but I also needed ruthlessness. So I'd pushed her as hard as I dared and made her a supervisor. She at least had some people skills, which is better than a lot of career folks. With some seasoning she'd make a good manager someday. But not yet.

I had a problem, a nightmare and an opportunity all in one person. Doctor Betty Rize, a licensed clinical psychologist, had been hired by the CLIENT as a contract worker to help keep people sane. Unfortunately for her, we'd confirmed her husband - a CLIENT employee - killed. So she was surplus to requirements. Her agreement was more serious than any of us knew - I'd interrupted her writing a termination letter to the planet with a .45 pistol in her mouth. There was some disagreement among the handful of us who knew about that whether I'd done her any favors by stopping her.

The good Doctor's continued employment on campus was governed by a written contract (!) between her and I, unenforceable in any court. I would not share with management her suicide attempt if in exchange she did whatever the fuck I wanted. That included allowing me to review all confidential patient notes and discuss her cases with her. I had also insisted that she have weekly therapy sessions with my next most qualified psych person, Mo. After some discussion, the three of us agreed that she was going to start smoking marijuana without the formality of a prescription - a termination offense, of which I had photos on file. Belt and suspenders. In intelligence terms, I had "turned" her - from a contract employee of the CLIENT to a covert agent unwillingly loyal to the COMPANY through me.

Mohammed ("Mo" to everyone who knows him) is a decent man and a great human being. I hated the fact that I had to force him to continue to work as a bomb technician, because I had no one else trained. He had no formal training in psychology but had grown up among a vicious civil war and knew people. Unlike most of our coders and some of our managers, he had people skills and knew how to use them. He was also gathering intelligence on the bombs he disarmed and needed intelligence on the bombs he might face. Now I had to ask him to take the next step.

Fire Captain Janine was rude and abrasive to everyone. This was OK because she was 1) that good at everything she did and 2) used her abrasiveness to conceal her heart of gold. She genuinely loved everyone and could not let them get that close. She'd started on site as a contract IT tech, but given her experience as a volunteer firefighter, had been drafted to run both our Fire Brigade and our employee Stretcher Bearers. The latter were very much the shallow end of the CLIENT employee talent pool and required constant training before incidents and meticulous supervision during them. She'd confided in me that she could never run Security because she couldn't imagine sending people out to what could be their deaths. But she forced herself to do exactly that, every time we sent the Fire Brigade and Stretcher Bearers out to save lives.

I called a meeting, near the explosives shed. "Ammunition Safety Technical Working Group." I invited each of the attendees verbally, not through the calendar system. I asked Brooke to take up overwatch in the middle distance with her rifle. She would know who each of us were, which was very dangerous, but she would not know anything we said.

I had dragged a folding table over in between the blast pits and a couple rough benches on either side.

When setting up the explosives shed, I had asserted loudly and repeatedly that having electronic devices anywhere near explosives storage was very dangerous. Mo had raised an eyebrow about a quarter inch when I maddogged him and said, "Isn't that right, ATO Mohammed?" and he therefore agreed on cue. Signage to that effect was posted and rigorously enforced.

So there was no telephone or data connection anywhere near the shed. A single open circuit could be closed at the Security Dispatch end to light a strobe light, telling anyone working in the explosives area to call in from outside the literal red line (of loose brick) on a handpack radio.

In practice, only blasting caps or live detonators were anywhere near that sensitive. But I figured out very early on that I needed an area completely free of electronic devices and explosives scare people.

As part of the security for this meeting I'd hooked up a potentiometer to that strobe light circuit to make very sure it wasn't carrying a voice signal.

As everyone arrived, I held up a small handwritten piece of paper written in pencil, "NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES LEAVE THEM HERE." They complied. Then they watched me eat the piece of paper.

I invited everyone to take a seat.

"Let's get started. This is not an ammunition safety meeting. I trust each of you with my life, implicitly. So it's awkward to have to insist on this, but I need everyone present searched by two other people for electronic devices. Weapons are groovy. That includes two people searching me."

Janine's eyebrows climbed so high they threatened to moonlight as fire spotter aircraft. But she was the first to step forward and search me for electronics. Her search was professional and thorough - although she had never taken Security's body search course. Sarah was the second and her search was almost cursory.

Nothing was found on anyone.


"We need to establish an intelligence capability on campus. Right now the site is like a drifting ship in a sea of hate. We don't know what is going on just miles from here. We have a rudder - the Site Location Executive, who keeps the contracts going. We have an engine - the employees, coding their precious little brains out. But we don't have navigation. We can't see what's going on and as we found out two months ago during the massive attack, that can kill us all.

"We need to be able to see what's going on off campus, and I can't possibly keep up with it all by myself. I have a plan but it starts with absolute trust. I can trust you all with my life, but I am risking 3500 lives on this project. I need warning before ... oh ... Homeland comes on campus again, because next time they're going to kidnap and/or murder some of our employees. Fucking anti-American treasonous neo-Nazi fascist bastards."

The looks said it all. I'd just commited actionable treason and made myself liable to a bullet in the neck. If I were lucky.

But they were nodding. I had said the unsayable.

"I need to ask each of you to trust each other that much. If you aren't willing to trust every other person at this table with your life, speak up now."

Everyone looked at Sarah, then at Dr. Rize. Sarah's disdain for Betty was legendary. In front of me at a cafeteria table, Sarah had threatened to kill her with a knife, "slow." Admittedly this was half an hour after Betty's unsuccessful suicide attempt, so I'd let it slide.

But I'd briefly spoken to Sarah before the meeting.

"I know you don't trust Dr. Rize. But I'm going to need you to lie and say you do."

So Sarah leaned back a little and muttered, "Doctor, you're a piece of shit. But you're _our_ piece of shit."

Everyone else was good. Sarah and Wyatt were a package deal. Everyone liked Mo and once they'd gotten to know her, loved Janine. Sharon had worked her ass off. We'd all saved each other's lives numerous times.

"Here's what I'm thinking. This is on top of your current jobs, with one exception. Sarah and Sharon, intelligence supervision and analysis. Wyatt, I'm going to pull you out of Dispatch and put you in the File Storage Room sorting boxes, at COMPANY rather than CLIENT expense. What I'm really going to do is make you a full time analyst, and that will be your work area. Janine, I need you to be our secure IT support and take a stab at ELINT in your dubious spare time, as well as helping recruit agents. Mo, I'll also want you to help with recruitment but you'll be both generating intel and using it, about both bombs and the tangos who set them up."

Everyone nodded except Betty.

"Dr. Rize, I'm asking you to take over HUMINT, or Human Intelligence. That means that Mo and Janine and I help you identify agents, and then you run them. I will also run a few, and we will share some, but you will do the bulk of the human intelligence gathering at the site. This has some overlap with your existing skills and I think you're up to the challenge.

"If Homeland catches us, and they might, they're not going to kill you. They're going to rip out your fingernails and your toenails and hook up clamps to your genitals and make you scream and suffer until you beg them for a bullet in the brainpan. And then they will say no and do it all some more. And I can't promise to save your life. I will do the best I can to kill you, if I can. But I can't even guarantee that.

"This is totally voluntary. Are you game?"

She nodded briskly. I caught the very slight answering nod from Sarah. If Betty turned again, I knew just who I was going to frame for the murder.

"This next goes for everyone. I will utterly deny all of you. I never asked any of you to do any of these things. I expect you to utterly deny me. [Echo 18] is crazy, he threatened me, he's scary, he asked me to do it and I didn't know why, you name it. What matters is that we survive and we keep these people alive. That's it. And that means if some of us get nailed and some of us do not, the ones who are fucked take the fall so the survivors can keep trying. If you don't carry a firearm, start carrying poison.

"The File Storage Room is our new intelligence office. When we have utter complete privacy, right now, we just call it the Room. Otherwise we don't talk about it. Ever. Outside of these weekly secured meetings, if two of us have to talk about this stuff, we go in the Room and we write on a notepad with a piece of cardboard under, trading it back and forth. At the end of a conversation, the notes and cardboard are shredded. If it's really time critical, we go on a patrol and leave all electronics including our radios out of microphone range and whisper in each other's ears. But try real hard not to do that because it's very dangerous.

"The official version of this meeting is that we had a huge fight about fire safety and we have to keep meeting to resolve. Janine, you're going to inspect the Room and discover that the fire systems have been fucked with. This is going to cover you searching the room all over and making it as secure as possible. Think TEMPEST, think ELINT, think paranoid. I need four secure computer stations with vicious firewalls and custom operating systems. Buffer the power. Make sure the network connection is one way. I don't want anyone on the internal network ever figuring out that those four computers exist. Mo?"

His face was grave. "After the satchel charge attack on the Security Office, I looked through the servers to see if there was anything that could be salvaged. Most of it is trash but they weren't all digital video recorders. They were telephone recorders and audio recorders, network monitoring appliances. The control server had an explosive bolt mounted over the hard drive."

That last was felony level illegal and would normally arrest the attention of both the ATF and the San Jose Fire Department's Arson Unit. The CLIENT would never do such a thing. It would take a master criminal or a top secret government agency.

I had found notes from five years back giving instructions that the servers were not to be tampered with and providing (expired) contact information for a front company on the East Coast. That let the master criminals off the hook.

"In other words, we must assume that anything electronic not only could be compromised, but already _has_ been compromised. That's the computers, the phones, the WiFi cells, the servers. All of it. If it has a battery attached, it can compromise us."

"Thanks Mo. So here are some counterintelligence rules. First of all, there's a handwritten document in the Room. Moscow Rules. Memorize them. Live by them or die by them. Note that it's in my handwriting. Use that if we get totally blown - blame it all on me, save yourselves as much as you can.

"We operate on Moscow Rules at all times. There's also some spy novels - read them when you get time - and a couple paper manuals, and some books on crypto and ciphers. Once we get some computers up I'll have a lot more stuff for people to look at.

"Second, you use your memory. You don't write things down or put them in computer files, except on a secured computer in the Room. If you take notes outside the Room, you do it in a cipher - never in a language. Then you keep those notes on your body at all times. Try not to do that.

"We don't have a shredder box in the Room. We have a shredder. Use it. Disposal of chads will be creative. But create as little paper as possible so we have to dispose of as little as possible.

"I will train each of you as much as I possibly can. But you also need to learn for yourself. This is a huge project on top of our other work. But if we're going to get through this storm, we need to figure out the motion of the ocean."

Nods again from around the table. This was not a crowd big on talking; that had been a criterion.

We started talking shop. Comparing notes on people we could recruit - as agents, not knowing anyone but the one person they interacted with. A few would be live drops, or passed messages. But most would be dead drops - leaving something somewhere where it would be picked up. Figuring out ways of keeping ourselves safe. Normal patterns of routine. Ways to discreetly work together without anyone realizing it.

We knew one thing for sure already, as certain as the sweat at the small of my back when wearing armor.

Homeland already had agents among us. But if they had an agent among this group, we were all walking dead and didn't know it yet. And it would be all my fault.