Infected Page 2

“Captain Jinky has to know what, sir?”

“Has to know about the Triangles.” The voice was soft. The words came between big breaths, like someone trying to talk just after an intense workout.

“Right, the triangles. Sounds more like a personal problem, sir.”

“Don’t patronize me, you stupid c.u.n.t!”

“Hey, you don’t get to scream at me like that just because I’m a phone screener, okay?”

“It’s the Triangles! We have to do something. Put me on with Jinky or I’ll come down there and stick a f.u.c.king knife in your eye!”

“Uh-huh,” Marsha said. “A knife in my eye. Right.”

“I just killed my whole family, don’t you get it? I have their blood all over me! I had to! Because they told me to!”

“This isn’t funny, you idiot, and by the way, you’re the third ma.s.s murderer that’s called here this morning. If you call back, I’m calling the cops.”

The man hung up. She sensed he was getting ready to say something, to scream at her again, right until she said the word cops. Then he hung up and hung up fast.

Marsha rubbed her face. She’d wanted this internship, and who didn’t? Captain Jinky had one of Ohio’s highest-rated morning shows. But man, this phone-screening gig, with the crazy calls day after day . . . so many r.e.t.a.r.ds out there who thought they were funny.

She rolled her shoulders and looked at the phone. All the lines were lit up. Seemed everyone in the city wanted to get on the air. Marsha sighed and punched line two.

In Cleveland, Ohio, there is a room on the seventeenth floor of the AT&T Huron Road Building, formerly known as the Ohio Bell Building. This room does not exist.

At least, what’s in the room does not exist. On maps, building records, and to most people who work on the seventeenth floor, Room 1712-B is just a file-storage room.

A file-storage room that is always locked. People are busy, no one asks, no one cares — it’s like millions of other locked rooms in office buildings all over the United States.

But, of course, it’s not a file-storage room.

Room 1712-B doesn’t exist, because it’s a “Black Room.” And “Black Rooms” don’t exist — the government tells us so.

To get inside this Black Room, you have to run a gamut of security screens. First, talk to the seventeenth-floor guard. His desk happens to be just fifteen feet from 1712-B. He’s got security clearance from the NSA, by the way, and is perfectly willing to cap your a.s.s. Second, slide your key card through the slot next to the door. The card has a built-in code that changes every ten seconds, matching an algorithm based on the time of day — this one makes sure only the right people can enter at the right times. Third, type your personal code into the keypad. Fourth, press your thumbprint onto a small gray plate just above the door handle so a fancy little device can check your thumbprint and your pulse.

Truth be told, the fingerprint scanner isn’t worth a c.r.a.p and it can be easily fooled, but the pulse check is handy — just in case you’re just a tad overly excited because someone has a gun to your head, a gun that was probably used to kill the aforementioned security guard. If you successfully navigate these challenges, 1712-B opens to reveal the Black Room — and the things inside that also do not exist. Among those goodies is a NarusInsight STA 7800, a supercomputer designed to perform ma.s.s surveillance on a mind-boggling scale. The NarusInsight is fed by fiber-optic lines from beam splitters, which are installed in fiber-optic trunks carrying telephone calls and Internet data into and out of Ohio. This technojargon means that those lines carry all digital communication in Ohio, including just about every phone call made in and out of the Midwest. Oh, you’re not from the Midwest? Don’t worry, there are fifteen Black Rooms spread around America. Plenty for everyone.

This machine monitors key phrases, like nuclear bomb, cocaine shipment, or the ever-popular kill the president. The system automatically records every call, tens of thousands at a time, using voice-recognition software to turn each conversation into a text file. The system then scans the text file for those potentially naughty terms. If none are found, the system dumps the audio. If they are found, however, the audio file (and the voice-to-text transcript) is instantly sent to the person tasked with monitoring communication containing those terms.

So yeah, every call is monitored. Every. Single. Call. For terrorism words, drug words, corruption words, all the stuff you’d expect. But due to some rather violent cases that had popped up in recent weeks, a secret presidential order added a new word to the national-security watch list.

And in this case “secret” wasn’t some doc.u.ment that people discussed in hushed tones with Beltway reporters. This time, “secret” meant that nothing was written down, no record of any kind, anywhere.

What was that new word?

Triangles.

The system listened for the word triangles in a.s.sociation with words like murder, killing, and burn. Two of those words happened to be used in a certain call to a certain guest line for Captain Jinky & the Morning Zoolander’s radio show.

The system translated that call to text, and in a.n.a.lyzing that text found the words triangles and killed in close proximity. “Stick a f.u.c.king knife in your eye” didn’t hurt, either. The system marked the call, encrypted it, and shipped it off to its prea.s.signed a.n.a.lyst location.

That location happened to be yet another secret room, this one located at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. When a room at the CIA headquarters is secret, a secret from people who spend their lives creating and breaking secrets, that’s some pretty serious black-ops s.h.i.t.