“Mobile?” Craterly questioned.
“Not sure. Enter it as a secondary parameter.”
“If it was mobile, it would be gone now, right?” Moose asked.
“Excellent—we’ll look for what’s different. Program comparative looks at the scene, before and after the time of the crash at two-hour intervals. Extra points for heavy-duty vehicles, something capable of hauling generators and electronic equipment.”
“SIGINT,” Craterly suggested. “If this involved GPS jamming, it might show up in regional signal captures.”
“How do you figure?” Kyle asked.
“A false signal could screw up navigation for cars, boats, mobile phones, anything that uses GPS to compute position and time. Some of those devices will send silent auto-alerts to the system administrators. We should look for reported GPS anomalies within a fifty-mile radius, say two hours before or after the crash.”
“I like it,” said Moose as he typed nonstop.
“Heat!” Craterly added. “The more power, the more effective jamming is.”
“Nice,” said Kyle. “High value to unusual infrared signatures.”
“We won’t get IR for the time of the crash,” Moose countered. “I took a glance at the airport weather. Cloud cover was thick.”
A valid point, Kyle thought. Clouds attenuated IR signatures.
“But it was clear three hours before the crash,” Craterly countered. “We back up and look for IR in an extended window. A vehicle positioning for an electronic attack would likely have been in place long before the event.”
The strategy session went on for another ten minutes, all three of them launching ideas like so many clay pigeons. Those that weren’t shot down were added to the search equation.
At the end, Kyle reviewed the parameters they’d come up with. Everyone was satisfied.
“There’s one more thing,” Kyle added. “Katie says one passenger appears to be missing from the wreckage. It’s possible they never got on the flight. We need to find out who it is.”
This strategy debate was more straightforward. Ten minutes later, Moose hit theSendbutton.
At something near the speed of light, their commands flashed beneath the Potomac on an SMF fiber-optic cable to a destination forty miles away.
MAADN was waiting.
In the last decade, Northern Virginia had become the dominant venue for data centers in the United States. The region was to AI what Silicon Valley was to microchips. The reasons were steeped in practicality: abundant power-supply and transmission infrastructure, proximity to submarine cable landing stations, and low-latency connections to insatiable government users across the D.C. metroplex.
The DIA’s newest warehouse in southern Loudoun County was, in appearance, like a hundred similar ventures. The mainexterior difference was the level of security on the perimeter—double-high fences rimmed with concertina, monitored surveillance, and a military police contingent. Inside the building, the difference was a matter of scale. Ten football fields of climate-controlled space was home to thousands of graphic processing units, neuromorphic processors, and ASIC chips. They hummed in parallel, lights blinking like a galaxy of binary heartbeats.
MAADN received the instructions from its operators and immediately set to the task. For six seconds the AI supercomputer strategized and divided tasking. Within a minute, information was cascading in from six of the nation’s foremost intelligence-gathering agencies.
Without so much as a paused breath, MAADN went to work.
19
Crash Site
12 Nautical Miles East of Bodrum Airport
Bodrum, Turkey
1650 Local Time
Katie trudged up a hillside toward the makeshift parking area. The sun had been intense all day, and after hours of clambering over cratered hills and rutted scrubland, she was dead-tired. She’d been going nonstop since daybreak, the only diversion being when she and Conza had gone back to the hotel for a working lunch.
Much of her time on-site had been spent on the phone, making calls and sending emails to coordinate support. Unfortunately, communications security was an issue, meaning she had to limit what she discussed and with whom. She hadn’t been issued a special phone—nothing like the satellite devices Tier 1 operators were given—which put her at the mercy of local networks. Those, she had to assume, were compromised at some level. The nearest available secure connection was at the SCIF in the embassy in Istanbul, a five-hour drive to the north. That wasn’t a viable option, so she simply had to be careful.
