“We’ve been trying to determine if that happened,” Sutton admitted. “No luck yet.”
“It could have been foreign service,” Hiram pointed out, “someone you don’t have access to.”
“We have access to everyone,” Sutton assured him.
“Trust me.”
“What about the names of those hackers?” Pitt asked. “He didn’t just pluck them out of thin air.”
Sutton shrugged. He had no comeback to that.
“Now for the elephant in the room,” Pitt said. “We know where Sutton stands. He thinks this is all one big delusion. But what does it mean if Kurt’s actually onto something?”
Trent MacDonald wrung his hands for a second. Pitt noted that the CIA rep had been awfully quiet.
“Trent?”
“If he’s onto something, if Sienna Westgate is alive and in the hands of foreign nationals or persons unknown, then we may have a bigger problem than any of us know. At the very least, we should let Kurt continue and look into this Than Rang character. With a little prodding, I might be able to pledge some help. We have a lot more assets on the Korean Peninsula than we do in Iran.”
Dirk nodded quietly. He couldn’t recall a time he’d gotten so much cooperation from the CIA. He wondered if it had something to do with Kurt’s history there or, for that matter, with Sienna’s. A thought formed in his mind. “Is Sienna Westgate still working for the CIA?”
MacDonald did not reply immediately. “In a manner of speaking,” he said finally. “Sienna legitimately left the Agency eight years ago. We didn’t want to lose her when she went private, but we couldn’t compete with a guy like Westgate and all he had to offer.”
“Go on,” Pitt said.
“She was brilliant,” MacDonald said, nodding to Hiram. “You’ve seen her work.”
“A savant,” Yaeger said. “And I mean that as the highest compliment I can give.”
“Exactly,” MacDonald said. “So we made a deal with her and Westgate. We gave them the beginnings of our most advanced theoretical system and asked them to build it into an unbreakable barrier.”
“Which she turned into Phalanx,” Pitt said.
MacDonald nodded.
“But you never expected it to get out of the bottle,” Yaeger pointed out.
“No,” MacDonald said. “And that possibility is daunting for two reasons. One, we’re going to lose a lot of intelligence- gathering ability if the rest of the world co-opts Phalanx and keeps us from prying into their systems. But there’s a bigger worry, one we don’t know how to quantify.”
“Which is?”
“We all believe that Phalanx is unbreakable. We’ve installed it on everything from the DOD computer network to the Social Security database, but no one knows as much about it as Sienna Westgate. She was the lead designer of the project, she was the only one entrusted with the technology we gave her, and she took it ten steps beyond. That means she knows its weaknesses better than anyone. She might even have designed a back door into the system in case she ever needed to use it. We have no way of knowing.”
Pitt was beginning to understand. “And Phalanx is now protecting the entire federal government.”
MacDonald nodded. Sutton did likewise.
“Maybe we should pull Phalanx off active duty,” Pitt suggested.
“It’s being considered,” Sutton said. “But it would be premature and foolish to do so based on what we know at this point. We need proof one way or the other before we act.”
MacDonald summed up. “I don’t know if she’s out there and in the hands of our would-be enemies,” he said. “But as much as I hate to say it, I’d be a lot happier knowing for certain that she’d been dragged to the bottom of the sea and drowned.”
As cold as the statement was, Pitt understood the thought. “Then we’d better get a team down to what’s left of Westgate’s sunken yacht,” he said bluntly. “It’s a long shot, considering the condition of the vessel. But if we find Sienna’s body, then you guys can rest easy. And I can bring Kurt home.”
The NUMA vessel Condor sat calmly on a glittering sea two hundred miles northeast of the South African port city of Durban. The sun was high above and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sea was like glass.
With no weather on the horizon and the automated station system holding the Condor against the current and keeping her over the proper coordinates, there was little activity on the bridge.