As the Divisional Agent in Charge of the NSA's ultra-secret Sigma Division, Marshall was officially based in Maryland, but lately he found that he was spending most of his time out in the western states, New Mexico and Nevada.
Marshall was a tall man of fifty-two, mostly bald, with a white-grey beard and hawk-like black eyebrows that narrowed at his nose, giving him a perpetual look of deadly seriousness. He had been in charge of Sigma Division -- the NSA's elite high technology discovery division -- for six years now.
Back in the seventies and eighties, the NSA had been the US intelligence community's pride and joy, electronically compressing billions of encryption algorithms that were to become the foundation of its world- renowned code-breaking computers. Then, in the early nineties, Sigma added to this lustre when it utilised semiconductor technology to make the greatest breakthrough in the history of code making and breaking -- it successfully created the world's first quantum computer.
But with the subsequent thawing of the Cold War, code-cracking began to assume a lesser priority in the eyes of the government. Budgets were cut. Money was diverted to other sectors of the intelligence community and the military. The NSA had to find something
James Marshall and Sigma Division were tasked with finding this new expertise.
Within weeks, Sigma's resources were focused upon a new and remarkably different goal. Only this was a goal that did not require the
Technology that man himself could not create.
But technology which the NSA -- and the NSA alone, with its new quantum supercomputers -- would be in a unique position to decipher and exploit.
Marshall took it all with a grain of salt. Sure, the Air Force had built underground warehouses in New Mexico and Nevada. But despite the reports of television specials asserting that they had in fact found, captured and studied alien spacecraft and lifeforms -- one such special even suggested that the technology behind the Stealth Bomber came from such studies -- those warehouses had remained irrefutably and unequivocally empty.
In short, the Air Force had found nothing. And in the ever-competitive quest for budget dollars, that provided the NSA with an opportunity...
And as his plane made its descent, he looked at the printout in his lap for the hundredth time.
Two hours ago, at 6:01 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, an NSA satellite,
The displacement had not been present during any previous sweeps, and its amperage was dangerously similar to that of previously recorded electronic scrambling -- or jamming -- frequencies used by North African guerilla forces, in particular those used by Libya.
And after the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 by North African extremists and the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998, no-one in the NSA was willing to take any chances.
The response was immediate.
The
By chance, the Eavesdropper happened to be in the right place at the right time and was on the scene in minutes, and the first set of results were soon in the hands of the NSA's crisis management team in Maryland -- a team that had included Marshall.
Once those results had been reviewed, in the space of nine minutes all records of correspondence between satellite control in Maryland,
It was then that the mission had been handed to James Marshall and his boys at Sigma Division.
Time was short, and Marshall had wasted no time.
He had raced to the airport immediately and as he stepped onto the Director's Lear, someone at Sigma was already preparing a press release that would explain the unfortunate and regrettable loss of the two satellites.
And so here he was. On the NSA Director's Lear ready for touchdown in New York.
Marshall reached into his suitcase for a final look at the report from the Eavesdropper.
Judging by the long stretch of time covered in the report, Marshall noted, the Eavesdropper could hold its field of view on a single target for a full fifty minutes. Its orbital velocity must have been much slower than that of the smaller
Marshall read the transcript.
LSAT-560467-S
DATA TRANSCRIPT 463/511-001
SUBJECT SITE: 231.957 (North-eastern seaboard: CT, NY, NJ)
NO. TIME/EST LOCATION READING
1. 18:03:48 CT. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:09
2. 18:03:58 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:06
3. 18:07:31 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:05
4. 18:10:09 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:07
5. 18:14:12 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:06
6. 18:14:37 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:02
7. 18:14:38 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:02
8. 18:14:39 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:02
9. 18:14:40 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:02
10. 18:16:23 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:07
11. 18:20:21 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:08
12. 18:23:57 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:06
13. 18:46:00 N.Y. Isolated energy surge/Source: UNKNOWN
Type: UNKNOWN / Dur: 0.00:34
Marshall frowned at the transcript.
At the moment it meant nothing to him.
