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CHAPTER 28

Saratoga Springs, Utah

National Security Agency

Utah Data Center, Code Name “Bumblehive”

Sunday

10:00 a.m. Mountain Time


Dr. Kevin Grayson had been up all damned night running algorithms on the massively parallel Cray XC30 supercomputer, code name “Cascade.” Kevin had the system currently optimized and overclocking at a bit over one hundred petaflops, over one hundred thousand trillion calculations per second. The actual speed it was running was above Top Secret. There were rumors in the public that the system had reached an “exaflop,” or over a quintillion instructions per second, but Dr. Grayson could neither confirm nor deny such claims. At least he couldn’t if he planned on staying out of jail for violating national security secrets and wanted to keep getting paid to do the thing he loved most—solving computational problems.

He had been looking for anything useful about the missing Topol-M warheads. He’d tried the names that Colonel Alvarez and Ginny had sent him via JWICS and had crossed correlated and cross-referenced every piece of information that they had dug up with each other in every possible combination imaginable. So far, he’d come up with nothing. He’d tried running lists of names, keywords and phrases, locations, times, dates, anything pertinent to the event but still the computer had yet to spit out anything new. He’d made the algorithm start sending web crawlers and agents out through every internet protocol hub in existence looking for a match on any of the data keywords and phrases, images, sounds, and concepts. So far, not a single superbot had brought a thing back into the fold. The might of the National Security Agency’s most advanced computer was still coming up with nothing. Whoever had been behind the warhead theft and whoever had funded it were a mystery. They were good at covering their tracks or erasing them altogether.

Grayson had racked his brain to the point of having nothing else he could contribute. He had reached a complete fugue state of hopelessness, helplessness, and was at a total loss as of what to do next. There just wasn’t enough data yet to figure out who, what, when, or where. He leaned back in his desk chair and rolled his neck left then right to remove the cramping in his shoulders from the bad ergonomics and posture of hovering over a keyboard and staring deeply into a monitor for hours. He was tired. The bags under his eyes and the bloodshot whites of his eyeballs were testament to that fact. He also needed to shave and probably shower on top of that. He had existed on coffee, soft drinks, then energy drinks, and junk food out of the vending machine in the break area for double-digit hours.

Perhaps that was the problem. Kevin decided that he was just too tired and burned out at the moment to think straight. So, he made the concerted effort to force himself up from his desk chair, stretch his body, put on his jacket, and go for a damned walk around the Bumblehive complex. He hit go on the latest search algorithm, waited for it to signal that there were no errors, and then left Cascade to do her thing. He had no idea how long the latest iteration on the cross-correlation search would last, but he had time for at the very least a ten-minute walk. And, maybe, he had time for another cup of coffee.

“Who, what, when, or where,” he muttered to himself. “Hell, any single one of those would be something we don’t know right now.”

He passed out his office and down the hallway and badged out into the common area. The building was usually a busy beehive—that part of the facility’s code name had always been apropos, although Kevin had always wondered why “Bumblehive” as opposed to other more industrious bees like honeybees. But today, the Bumblehive was pretty much a ghost town. It was Sunday morning, in Utah. Most people were at church. Other than security teams, he’d only seen a single-digit number of people so far. He figured they were wrapped around some conundrum of national security like him, but he didn’t take the time to stop and chat with them to find out.

A short flight of stairs down—he often decided against the elevator, not really for the exercise but more because he didn’t trust computer-driven machines—and another badge-through and he was outside standing on the sidewalk with the Bumblehive standing tall behind him. It was a brisk morning in Utah, almost forty-five degrees. He zipped his jacket up, put his hands in his pockets, and started walking. The employees there often walked, jogged, ran, biked, rollerbladed, and other forms of outdoor exercise around the periphery of the building. He decided he had time for about two to three kilometers’ worth of walking before he needed to get back and check on Cascade.

The Utah sky was perfectly clear. There wasn’t a cloud as far as he could see and from there, that was likely seventy kilometers or more. Kevin often made the walk and watched the skies as he did. The rumors of unknown aerial phenomena flying over the state had been around for maybe thousands of years. He’d been working there nearly a decade now and had yet to see a damned thing with his own eyes. But many of his colleagues had video on their phones of UFOs they’d seen. He had never really been certain what to think of it. He’d used Cascade several times to search through the classified databases on the topic but usually came away with more questions than answers.

That had always bothered him. How was it that with all that classified information he’d never been able to find the who, what, where, when, or how of the UFO story? Oh, he’d found plenty of credible videos, sensor data, photos, and eyewitness accounts from trained military officers, but none of it proved what the damned things were. Why hadn’t he found the “program” that really knew what they were? Was it because it wasn’t there? Was it covered up better than even the NSA could uncover? And more importantly, why? It had always truly boggled his mind as to why anyone would cover up just the knowledge of existence. He could understand keeping ways and means and technological breakthroughs a secret, but why just the general knowledge of existence? Why?

“Why?” he actually said aloud. He stopped dead in his tracks and said it again. “Why?”

The thought rang a bell in his mind about something. Why was the question that needed to be answered, but he had to ask the right “why.” They had exhausted themselves trying to determine the existential motivation, politically and philosophically, as to “Why” somebody would steal nukes that could be so devastating. But that was the wrong question.

“Wait a minute…” he said with the realization that the right “Why” was a much more pragmatic one and was maybe even not a “Why” with a capital W. It was a smaller, more applied “why.” Or maybe it was a small-case “what,” as well.

“Why!” He smacked his right palm against his forehead. “Why? Why do they need the nukes? What are they going to use them for?”

He immediately decided that his walk was over and now walking was the action needed to get him back in front of Cascade. He did a full 360-degree turn and looked at his progress, trying to determine if he should push forward or turn back for the fastest path back to the office. He realized he was just about at the halfway distance, so it would make no difference. He started back walking and seriously picked up the pace and pushed forward.

“What could you do with six nukes?” he asked himself. “That’s the parameter…”


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Framed