Free The Merchant of Secrets by Caroline Lowther Page A

talking on the phone so the
escort left me there waiting for him in the doorway. He was engrossed in his
conversation and therefore didn’t notice me at all which created an opportunity
to turn around and disappear in the direction of the Counter Terrorism Center
which had been created in the mid 1980’s. The people in that unit were still
absorbing the damage done by the bombing of Camp Chapman in Afghanistan where
some of their best Taliban specialists were killed just a few months before.
     
    Agents were approaching from the opposite direction in
the hallway, clearly not recognizing me as a coworker who belonged in the
building. I kept calm and turned my face toward the wall of  paintings
of  “Wild “ Bill Donovan, Walter Bedell Smith,
Allen Dulles, George Bush, Stansfield Turner so the
 agents  could no longer see my face. As they walked past I had goose
bumps from the close call but I believed in what I was doing to my core and
willing to take risks without fully weighing the consequences.  Further
down the corridor the doors were locked but a metal pad was attached to the
wall so I unclipped my badge from my belt and swiped it. The doors slowly swung
open. Once inside the lab I used my passcode assigned by the RRR security
company to log in.  
     
    The new pilot program at the US Cyber command was also
accessible here in McLean. Downloading Qureshi’s emails onto an encrypted portable drive I saw the foreign protocol identifying
the location of the servers of the incoming and outgoing email. The majority of
the emails were to the worrisome destinations of Tehran, Shanghai, and Kabul.
 
     
     
     I wanted to stay and continue looking for files but
I had pushed my luck far enough so I logged off and walked out, closing the
door behind me.  When I exited the room, outside in the hallway the area
suddenly didn’t look familiar, it was confusing. On the wall to the left
bulletin boards hung from the walls but they weren’t there before. On the right
there were restrooms which weren’t there before either. I darted down a third
hallway, straight ahead but that dead ended at the company gift shop, with
t-shirts in the display window that read “my favorite spook”. There must have been
2 doors in the database room, I had entered through one and left through
another and now had gotten lost in a maze. Trying not to appear lost and out of
breath I dashed down another hallway and was looking out the window trying to
navigate a way to an exit when one of the guards took notice of my wanderings
and stopped me. I was foolishly tempted to make a run for it and may have done
just that except that there was a pleasant smile on the guard’s face.  He
wasn’t suspicious, assuming instead that he’d come across a registered visitor
who’d become lost and escorted me all the way back to the entrance from which I
had entered the building. Disaster averted.
     
    Back at the Pentagon, Boots was spending the week
preoccupied with putting together research for General X’s upcoming meeting at
the White House on the need to recognize Cyber Space as a “Fourth Domain” along
with Air, Land and Sea, and allocate a portion of the national budget
accordingly.  The budgeting process in Congress was stuck in the last century
while the greatest and most persistent threats to the security of the United
States had changed. The greatest threats became   attacks on our
networks, including the White House Communication system and the communications
systems that control the drones and missiles.  Financial networks had been
repeatedly hacked, including some of the largest banks in the U.S.A. It was
time to let the attackers know that the United States wasn’t going to stand by
and let this happen anymore.  In a huge policy shift, cyber warfare was
going to be defined on the same level as conventional warfare and therefore the
United States had the legal authority to respond militarily to attacks on our
secure networks. It was