Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin
conveniences of home in RVs, including satellite TV. This campground also had a wireless access point, provided for free by the Park Service. Harry sat in his truck, tapped out an e-mail to Dr. Bancroft about the find, attached a few pictures, and sent it off. He took ten minutes to surf the web, checking a few of his favorite news sites, then closed the laptop and drove back to camp.
CHAPTER THREE
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
José Splith worshiped the Echelon system. Sipping at his coffee as he sat in the windowless basement of a National Security Agency building outside Baltimore, Splith watched the world. Three computer screens, filled with colorful graphics, kept him abreast of the millions of transmissions being captured every minute.
Using satellites, taps on undersea cables, and giant dish farms to capture radio waves out of the ether, Echelon captured every cell call, every satellite transmission, every e-mail, every web request; in short, every electronic communication sent anywhere outside the United States. Federal law prohibited listening to transmissions within the United States and curiously enough, despite the paranoia of the conspiracy-obsessed fringe, the NSA used to actually follow the law to the letter.
Nineteen hijackers on 9/11 changed everything. The legal barriers fell down and information flowed. A libertarian fringe of computer aficionados had always argued that information wanted to be free, that software should be free, and that there should no restrictions on who could know what; at the NSA, information was free.
A massive farm of computers culled through the transmissions, flagging messages of interest and sending them to other computers for automated translation. The results flowed automatically to the screens of intelligence analysts, where they decided if something was worthwhile or just chatter by normal people. Despite the best efforts of the computer programmers, the NSA functioned in a constant state of information overload.
Splith’s job was to keep Echelon running, and that required spot checks—the best part of the job. He liked to listen, rather than read e-mail or instant messages, and so he preferred English. Earlier in the evening, a man and woman had argued on a transatlantic phone call about his affair with a waitress in Ireland. An hour later he found two lovers, parted by distance, having phone sex. He really liked that.
An alert window popped up on his computer screen, accompanied by a demanding beep. Splith sat down his coffee and peered closer. An e-mail sent from a computer in New Mexico to a computer in Scotland had been intercepted on a fiber optic cable stretched across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The analysis program had caught some keywords in the e-mail and prompted the alert.
Splith tapped a key and was surprised to see instructions scroll onto his screen. Normally an intercept was simply sent to the appropriate analyst, closeted in some other NSA building. These instructions told him to do three things: forward the e-mail to an outside e-mail account; print it out and fax it to a number in Indiana; and then make a phone call to another number and read the contents of the message into the answering machine at the other end.
He swallowed and blinked furiously. Those were phone numbers outside the NSA. He was being instructed to send top-secret data to outside numbers without a warrant or any form of oversight. He tried to wrap his brain around what this meant.
He did as he was told.
CHAPTER FOUR
Brenda lay on her sleeping bag, still in her clothes, her mind sparking with euphoria. She put her earplugs in and listened to her sat-radio for a while. She usually caught up on the world by listening to National Public Radio, but the world didn’t interest her right then. Maybe Harry and she would be on NPR, interviewed by one of the anchors about their discovery.
“And tell me, Ms. Finnigan, where are you from?”
“I’m from Augusta, Maine.”
“What made you want to become an archaeologist?”
“Oh, I guess I wanted to visit strange places, get my fingernails dirty, and get laid by exotic men, like that stud in The Mummy.”
She imagined the interviewer blinking in surprise, but quickly recovering by looking at the next question on her notepad.
“How did you feel when you found the Chacoan tomb?”
“Better than sex.”
Of course, she would never respond to the questions with such naughty answers. That was only to entertain herself when she couldn’t sleep.
For all her romantic intentions, she remained a virgin.
CHAPTER FIVE
The morning air refreshed Harry as he went through his exercises. Thrust, kick, pause, deep breath through the nostrils, concentrating on finding his center. It was hard to keep his thoughts from intruding. He felt the heavy weight of acting like a fool and had slept poorly. Forty-four years old, a man of the world, his neurons laden with experience, and he had acted like a giddy teenager. How could he have agreed to go into the tomb with Brenda? What had possessed him?
If he was honest with himself, the kind of honesty that left a man bare before the bright glare of insight that came from not protecting the ego with platitudes or rationalization, he knew that sometimes he made self-destructive decisions. Drinking binges that left him puking blood, embarrassed by the flashes of memory of what he had done while his judgment was pickled by alcohol. Some people say that alcohol reveals your true nature. Harry was a happy drunk, always trying to have a good time, never violent, never hurting people.
His father had been a drinker too, an easygoing drunk, but able to support himself because he only drank on weekends, never on the job. Harry had not wanted to be like his father. He had wanted to find pride in being a responsible soldier, always reliable, who never let his superiors or his buddies down. Instead, he became a conscientious drunk, like his father; there had been mistakes, though he was never caught.
Like many of his Army buddies, on leave he had completely let himself go. It was really stupid. He had cheated on his wife while drunk—not often, but once too often. Sadly enough, he couldn’t even remember the face of the woman who had given him the disease. There is no cure for genital herpes. He couldn’t bring that home, not ever. That was how he had come to be divorced, the greatest failure of his life.
Maybe going into the tomb was like the drinking binges, a release from the restriction of always doing the right thing. Lord, he had been such a fool. He stopped, exhaling sharply, the meditative peace that came from his forms completely gone.
In the clear desert air, where sounds carry much farther than one might expect, he heard the sound of a car engine. That was curious. It came from the road that led down into the canyon—a restricted road, not to be used by anyone without a permit. A park ranger would not be coming up the road this early in the morning.
Must be an emergency of some sort.
Grateful for an excuse to quit exercising and flee the company of remembered failures, Harry made his way off the hill towards the road. Perhaps Dr. Bancroft had called the rangers and asked them to pass on an urgent message, since cell coverage did not reach Casa Ángeles. What kind of argument could Dr. Bancroft make that would compel a ranger to get up this early?
The sun still remained below the horizon, though the eastern sky glowed with promise and the stars had started to fade. A light breeze carried the scent of sagebrush and dust. Harry watched the ground carefully, wary of shadows that might hide rocks and tufts of grass.
The car engine noise died. Odd; he didn’t hear the sound of a door being slammed shut.
Instinctively he crouched behind a large bush and strained to listen. Voices came to him. Two men, accents from the east coast, breathing heavily as they climbed the hill. He heard one of the men stumble.
“Damn, I hate the outdoors!” The voice had a Boston twang to it. “Always tripping you up.”
“Shh, keep it down. And don’t fall into the tomb. It’s around here somewhere.”
“We putting the bodies in the tomb?”