Harriett’s war experience in those latter years were divided between the noise and industry of Section VIII at Whaddon Hall and the quieter contemplation of Bletchley Park. Servile motivation was the obvious, common factor among the Intelligence staff in both places, which the management reinforced with a pervasive air of superior seriousness and a demand for silent obedience. Below the surface, personalities, foibles, hopes, dreams, fears and flaws bubbled like a kettle on permanent boil. A steady supply of steam hissed out from the staff as they released the pressures of war in ways mostly unseen but often heard and gossiped about.
The characters were many and varied because recruitment was haphazard and based on specific skill or task proficiency, not the nice-to-haves of honed professionalism and years of work experience. The war left no room to be picky. There were few certain archetypes but there were plenty who tried in some way to ape heroism, leadership, greatness and fortitude or what they thought those things were. Worst were the ones who behaved disingenuously to fit in or hide their true flaws and damage.
He wasn’t like that. That’s why she’d taken him to the hill. That’s why they’d enjoyed the fleeting sunshine and the simple food. That’s why they’d kissed. It wasn’t because of his looks - his rounded face, slightly blocky chin and dimpled smile - that were handsome or memorable to some but not all. It wasn’t because of a story he wanted or tried to tell anyone. Her position and access meant she already knew more truths about him than he knew. She’d spent some months handling operational reports from France and SOE actions in various territories. Occasionally, his action reports had crossed her desk. Passive subterfuge, stealth and covert integration was his main method, which allowed him and his fellow operators to establish communications and intelligence feeds that lasted when he’d been extracted. His secondary role was as a guerrilla fighter with resistance units, focused on command and control, communications and defence network targets. Those kind of fights blended covert intelligence gathering with cunning and fierce fighting skill, usually against difficult odds.
“It was a lot more about sneaking in and planting bombs than it was about running gunfights,” he had told her. “But there was wet work and attachments to platoon sized ambushes in Poland and Hungary. The end of France was some pretty honest fighting.” He knew she could look him up, so there was little point bullshitting in response to her questions. He’d killed mostly the right people for mostly the right reasons. That was as good as any of them could say about themselves. Everyone had their regrets, ghosts and nagging questions.
She’d kissed him because of the questions he asked of others. He’d never tried to speak about himself at that first dinner with Alan. He’d only asked questions about her and Alan and things they were allowed to discuss or wanted to talk about. She knew by then that he had three kinds of look: the genuinely inquisitive; the studiously engaged; the playfully joking. On the hill, she would come to see his lost, thousand yard stare that could overcome or even engulf people who’d been to places they would not have chosen to visit. He was self-aware enough to limit it quickly but he wasn’t its master. Not back then. It was on the hill too that she would glimpse his disarmed look that betrayed love.
Her hillock on the north side of Bletchley had lain at the end of a wooded run between meadows. She went there to lie on the north side, beneath a single weeping willow that stood atop and had grown with a view from the Park to the south, around to Granby in the north. In the ungrazed meadow she could eat lunch and read her books out of sight and undisturbed by the Park’s characters and types. Amongst the wildflowers and tall grass she could be in other places and times. Lying back she could be lost in the willow’s flowing organofractal patterns that changed at the mercy of the wind and the willow’s mood. On her hillock, there was no war; she was nothing and everything, although lunch was always of near equal standing.
He’d pulled a broken, slightly stale French baguette from his knapsack and laid the two pieces on its inner flap on the ground between them. Next, he pulled out an old, small slice of log about 8 inches in diameter. It was worn smooth but slightly dished. On the log platter he placed a packet of red-checked cloth containing a roundel of camembert and some dried apricots. Then he pulled out three small glass jars. From his pocket he drew a jack knife and sliced the bread on his rustic platter.
“What would you like? Butter, quince, camembert?”
“What would you like?” she asked him in reply.
“I quite like to start with just butter and a little salt, then work up.”
“Simple sounds fine to me.”
And that’s what we had, wasn’t it my love?
“Simple is fine, I agree,” you said. “Simplicity can be purity and there’s often goodness in purity.”
It was fine. You were fine, my love... All this time and I still love to kiss you like you were that almost stranger under my willow on the hill.
He didn’t bring any wine. That was the right thing to do.
The gentleness of their kiss was what had set it and him apart. Almost childlike in its brief duration, its tenderness made no demands and only sought to tell a fleeting story of interest and longing that was confirmed by his soft expression of delight and surrender.
“There was nothing but that moment, my love. All of life’s weight left me,” was what he told her later.
“Pattern match,” Thomas said. She knew it wasn’t him. His synthetic voice made her belly warm and breaths soft. She resisted the urge to open her eyes. She breathed out slowly, trying to retain the memory as it willed to give way to the external interruption. She loosened her mind’s grip on her love and he began to dissolve into the dull shimmer of coloured blackness in her mind’s eye. She lingered in the moment then made way for the next memory key.
It had been a week of filthy September weather across the whole of the South and the weekend was forecast to be no better. In the early hours before dawn she’d been following reports of a combined bomber raid returning from strikes on the Franco-German border. The morning fog had caused havoc with the returning aircraft who had to be diverted to FIDO equipped airfields. FIDO airfields had pipes running along either side of the runway that carried petrol to be burned along their length. This helped disperse the fog and make the runways more visible to the aircrews. There was a Mosquito crew who’d built quite a reputation for bombing missions and airborne kills. The pilot, Harry “Chokey” Swindell, got his nickname from his horrendous cough and his monopoly on the supply and consumption of Gitanes cigarettes within the British isles. She’d met Chokey and his navigator, Roger Garstang, at a series of secret briefing sessions for strikes on German manufacturing facilities where strike tactics and new combined formations were being developed. She’d delivered a section on optimising electronic detection of German aircraft using a new system called “Perfectos” that could trigger and track the German aircraft’s coded identification signals. Chokey and Garstang, it turned out, were good for a reason. They were an attentive pair who overprepared but took the piss out of themselves if they were ever required to speak up by pretending to know absolutely fuck all about what was going on. Everyone around them expected them to lead the Squadron sooner rather than later but they seemed happy just doing a solid job day in, day out while Chokey smoked himself to death and Roger pulled silly faces. They set up a Perfectos practise session for themselves with two other Mosquitos equipped to give out German IFF signals so that they could find and intercept them in amongst the clouds.
“Look Rog, I’m not sure this is going in. I think we need an expert onboard to make sure we don’t balls this lot up.” As Chokey was voicing his concerns, Roger was stood over the Perfectos device, tongue hanging out as he pushed the buttons with just his thumbs and his hands crossed over.
“So when this thing shows a swastika that’s when I tell you to drop the bombs?” said Roger.
“No idea. Let’s ask the expert.” Chokey looked up at Harriet stood a few feet away, gave the two-handed maritime distress wave and coughed loudly. “I think we’ll need a bit of operational assistance, if you wouldn’t mind, ma’am. Can you meet us at midday and take us through this in a little more detail?”
By half past twelve, Harriett was airborne in a Mosquito for the first time in her life to coach the pair on how to hunt targets with Perfectos. There was just enough space to squeeze in and sit on the cockpit floor or stand. They gave her a webbing belt with a snap hook to clip onto a strut to keep her safe.
“If you feel sick at any time, there’s some bags down there,” said Roger. “Don’t jump out unless we tell you, and only if you’re holding hands with at least one of us.”
“Thanks, I’m usually fine in the air and on boats but good to know,” she said. She was fine until they found their targets and then all hell broke loose.
That September morning she was in the air ops intelligence section, making sure that the other operators were doing their jobs properly gathering battle damage information and preparing their reports. When the aircraft diversions started, she began listening in to the area control frequency over the channel and south coast. A returning Mosquito crew were in serious trouble as the sun was just starting to come up.
“Gold one seven to South Sector. Mayday. Right engine’s gone, lost all the fuel. Can’t make a FIDO field. We’ll make land at Margate.”
“Fog’s all over the South, Chokey,” replied the controller. “Can you get to Cambridge?”
“Not without pedalling. Standby.” A few minutes passed.
“Gold one seven, we’ll have to bail out.” It was Roger. “We’ll be hopping out right abeam Margate, tight to the coast. Wake up the Navy, will you?”
“You’ll have to make do with the Home Guard, chaps. Good luck, God speed.”
When they were found in the water, Roger was hypothermic. Chokey was dead. He’d drowned, maybe as a result of getting tangled in his lines and trapped under his parachute. On their bombing run they’d protected three of their Lancaster bomber wingmen by intercepting two German Messerschmitts. They’d taken hits to the right engine but managed to dump their bombs in the right area and escape with the cover of a Lancaster and its guns. The damage was some of the worst yet seen to a Mosquito wing but it had still gotten them home. If it weren’t for the fog, they’d have made it back in one piece.
At 6am, Harriett broke away from the ops room and got her wretched, obligatory ritual out of the way. Martenson, her section boss, expected coffee, toast and a poached egg on his desk by his arrival at 6:30. He was a vile man who climbed the ladder with a combination of privilege and deception that hid his lack of skill and wit. As a boss, he was worse than a bully. If she got his tray started at 6:00 she could leave it on the shit’s desk before he arrived. That it had gone cold by the time he arrived was her daily revenge. That she took a desk with the rest of the girls instead of in the office was a matter of safety and sanity.
At 7:45, Margaret burst into the section room. She was a 19-year-old signals specialist from Southend. Naïve but happy, her wide-eyed smile and pretty blonde curls made Harriett treat her like a little sister.
“The boss! There’s been an accident.” Every head spun around at the noise of Margaret’s entrance. Every ear pricked up at the word “accident”. Her voice began to falter at what was probably sad news to most people. “His car! The police are ‘ere. Someone needs to talk to ‘em.”
Harriett was the ranking senior. She stood up, went to Margaret and put her arm around her shoulder to lead her out of the room. “Back to work ladies, please.”
They walked along the first floor corridor at the front of the building. Through the sash windows she could see the police car and an officer coming into the front door.
“What happened, love?” Harriett asked.
“They…” Margaret struggled to get past the gasp that played in her chest. “They… just said it was a car accident.”
The police recounted a sombre tail. Martenson’s car was found by a passer-by that morning. It had crashed into a drystone wall on a very tight bend on a back lane on his route home. From the direction and the state of the car, the crash must have happened the previous evening.
“Last night?”
“Yes, miss. He lives out in the sticks. Went through the wall, like he was going too quick. Hard to notice at night and no one’s really on them lanes much. Night fog wouldn’t have helped, neither. There was a fire. We’re sorry but he’s gone, miss.”
Beside her, Margaret began to sob like a school girl. Inside, Harriett felt nothing for Martenson. It was the thought of Chokey, trapped alone and struggling in the cold water that brought a tear to her eye.
“Pattern match,” said her love.
She breathed deeply to clear her mind, as she always did. She knew she should change that memory key but wasn’t sure why she hadn’t. That memory key was meant to be neutral, and in that pointed moment she had been and felt neutral. Her recollection felt the same. Martenson’s death did nothing to her. She had enough grace and control to resist revelling in the thought of universal justice or karma, but she was not so forgiving that she had ever seen him as a person whose flaws could be tolerated as part of an imperfect whole. When she returned to a desk in that office, it was as the Section Head in Martenson’s place. She threw out his chair and desk, repainted the walls, and gave away all the wall pictures and ornaments to anyone who’d take them to erase her memory of the shit.
Her mind’s eye brought a map of earth into focus. It was an early global dashboard that Cassandra prepared and fed.
“OK, let’s look at the primary nodes,” Alex Bukowski said as he worked at the interface to the nodal subsystem. Dark blue dots appeared on every continent. There were areas of concentration in Asia, Europe and the US. Australia’s dots were thinly spread. Africa was thinner, with concentrations in the biggest cities, but they knew the data was extremely sparse from the whole continent.
“These are localisations and transfers.” Rings in lighter blue appeared to indicate what the subsystem had established with high confidence as localised phenomena and networks. Again, they were spread around the globe. After the rings, lines in cyan began to trace out and connect the rings and dots. Within a few seconds the whole map was a mess of interconnections. Her heart sank. She knew what to expect, but it didn’t make it less tragic.
“How do we make sense of this?” she asked.
“I figured we could concentrate on a given locale, look at events and networks there, then consider the inbound physical supply. That’s all tangible and manageable. Electronic networks is a whole other thing, whole other strategy. Literally a different kind of war. We knew it was beyond us so our objectives need to be… realistic.”
“What’s Cassandra calculate as the growth rate, Alex?”
“Material - that we know ‘bout - is growing at maybe 10-15%. That’s based on sampling of intel and police hacks and feeds crossed against traffic and flow analysis. Physical estimates are 5-15% but that’s a guesstimate. We can’t really know.”
The pain in her heart begged to be assuaged by calling Paul and Evelyn.
“Pattern match,” said Thomas.
Thomas dragged the skull cap into place one more time. A blip of the electromags seated the tiny pins of the cap in the nanoports in the surface his scalp with a crescendo of tiny clicks. He relaxed his body as he sat cross legged on the plinth, closed his eyes and cleared his mind with the simple mantra.
Om tat sat. Om tat sat.
What could have been moments or minutes passed until he smelled the scent of the air after the showers at Whaddon. The damp, fertile scent mixed with grass and soil as he crouched at a hedgerow leading to the gravel frontage where the Jeep was parked. The weeks of downtime between deployments had been ample time to study the Whaddon and Bletchley sites, and movements as well. Sneaking in was easy for those on the inside. He could’ve checked in at the gate but then he’d have had to explain his whereabouts on site if anyone were to become suspicious later. Far safer to sneak in, like any other job. Masterton’s pilfered Jeep had a good ground clearance that made his job easy. Much easier than dangling under the cab in Paris over cobbles while being hunted. On his back, he took the hand drill and set to slowly drilling a hole for the hook, conscious of the noise. It was twilight but there were staff around and the patrols were regular. The dirty steel was tricky and the drill bit stuck and slipped. It was a couple of minutes before he managed to get a steady bite and hole forming, then another couple until he was through the panel. He twisted in the screw end of the hook, checked it was secure and could take his weight on the belt with a few bounces and drops. He lifted himself free of the hook, listened and looked for signs of movement then eased out from under the Jeep. Crouching beside the left front wheel he found the brake line, ran a saw blade around the top edge of the calliper nut to weaken the hose then tied a line of steel wire around the point of sabotage. He repeated the same at the left back brake line, ran the wires under the Jeep, fastened up his boiler suit and slid back under to dangle back off the hook. He wound the wires around the hook leaving plenty of slack back to the brake lines, checked his torch worked then stashed it under his suit, against his chest. It was 18:23. Masterton was one of those clockwork assholes. In seven minutes he’d be out and on his last drive.
It was about 25 minutes to the spot, over reasonable roads then crappy lanes. Thomas tested his ability to press tight against the sub frame. Any bangs or rattles and Masterton would be alerted, pull over and that would be that. After twenty minutes Thomas would keep his torch on the road below to look for the mark he’d left: a painted white spot that was his start point.
The drive was rough. Masterton didn’t spare the horses. The Jeep enabled him to keep the speed up on the lanes and he wasn’t too shy of potholes. It took all of Thomas’ strength to cling on inches above the road. He was quickly soaked with road spray, the cold penetrated his boiler suit and the two layers of thick denim jeans and heavy cotton work shirts. He did his best to keep time in his head as a way to keep the road out of his mind and the physical strain at bay. When Masterton brought it to a slow roll into a junction he checked his watch. 18 minutes. Nearly there.
When he saw his mark pass below him on the road, he wound the wires around his left hand, yanked them tight and pulled hard. He felt them cut into the brake lines, then through. Without more thought, he undid the thick belt and dropped to the road, curving his back to keep his head up. The leather frappe hat wasn’t a helmet but it did the job of absorbing the inevitable bang of his head against the tarmac. Impact and then friction heat shot through his back and legs as soon as he contacted the road. He tried to relax and spread out, then dig his heels in. His momentarily controlled slide became a tumbling spin then he contacted the verge and his momentum flipped him up, over and into a tumble, through the long grass, sidelong against the drystone wall at the edge of the road. He must have hit at about 10 or fifteen miles an hour and the wind was slammed out of him as his shoulder then his ribs took the impact.
Through his groan and some kind of click or crunch, he heard a slide that became a screech, then a stoney, steely crash that lingered into the noise of the Jeep’s movement destructively dissipating beyond the wall. He rolled onto his back, took a deep breath and eased himself up. He wasn’t so bad; just a numbness from the knock, but mobile. He jogged along the verge in the growing darkness until he saw the breach in the wall at the bend. A little further until he smelled the exhaust and fuel mixed, then saw a single headlamp in the field beyond.
The impact had been bad. The Jeep must have tumbled and gone through the wall against the driver’s side and probably rolled through. It was twenty feet past the breach. Just inside the wall, he slowed and began to walk on the edges of his feet to limit his footprints. The Jeep was belly up, its flimsy cabin mostly crushed. Peering under and into the front seats, he was relieved. Masterton was trapped inside, practically crushed double into the edge of the bent steering wheel and against the flat metal of the sparse dashboard. Pure luck had kept him in the Jeep instead of flung forty feet further into the field. He squatted, waited and listened.
The Jeep clicked and creaked as stress and heat leaked from its wrecked form. The smell of fuel was strong enough to overpower the scent of blood. No sound came from the lane or anywhere around, save for the varied hiss and whirl of the growing wind. A front was coming and he would have to speed march home through whatever the sky was about to unleash.
The gurgling, spluttering sound was what he waited for. He reached under to feel for Masterton’s body, then pushed. A grunt and half cry indicated responsiveness to pain. He waited another minute until a wail crept out from beneath the ruined Jeep.
“Can you hear me?” said Thomas.
“Gnnnahhhh!” The guttural wail gave way to sucking breaths then choking.
“You shouldn’t have touched them. Any of them. You were their boss. Their leader. Only the weakest betray people like you did.”
Thomas rose, edged to within reach of the hook, twisted it free and pocketed it. From under his shirts he pulled a rag, wiped it in the stream of leaking fuel and twisted it up. He edged around to the front left wheel, checked there were no traces of wire around the cut brake line then squeezed petrol from the rag onto the line and the brake calliper and set it alight with his Zippo. At the back left wheel he unpicked the wire which had snapped and only cut halfway through the brake line, then doused it as before and set it going. With oversized steps on the edges of his feet he put some distance between him and the wrecked, upturned car. He lit the rag with his zippo and cast it at the twisted compartment near the fuel tank. It took in an instant and he immediately strode towards the wall at the field’s edge without looking back. He scaled the wall in two moves and began the miles of his cross country escape. He heard the roaring of the fire and a guttural choking scream like the ones he’d heard before.
“Motif détecté,” said the system voice that sounded like Marcel. He’d been conditioned to pay such close attention to Marcel’s tones and that night in the Café de Flore was so burned into him that he’d made it his system’s voice to guarantee he paid it serious attention.
It felt like self-flagellation to relive Masterton’s final ride so often, but he deserved worse. He had meted out a kind of one man justice that only God could forgive and no other person on Earth knew about. It was an unhackable, unspoofable key that no one could recreate.
He sucked deep breaths in again and again, dumping the innate stress that the trauma forced into him, then returned to the mantra.
Om tat sat. Om tat sat.
It was only at the end of his career that he came to understand what the Agency had really been in his life. It was a double-sided delusion. It pretended to be something that it wasn’t - a servant of the government and therefore of the people; mostly good with a secret bit of necessary evil. Those in it deluded themselves along their own lines, most of which stemmed from that initial false pretence of necessary service, “For God and Country”. He had been no different. With all his access to the most exotic of truths, he had still deluded himself into believing that somehow there was righteousness in there somewhere, on balance, and also that what he himself specifically did was right enough to keep doing, even with all the degrees of compromise and ultimately subterfuge that he and then they had come to employ.
That the Agency had willingly, deliberately appropriated the Book of John was the truth hiding in plain sight. “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Despite that assumed motto, nothing could be further from the truth when it came to the Agency. The Agency was a kind of power that redefined the meaning of freedom on its own terms, at the expense and enslavement of everyone outside of it. That was what he and his friends had come to understand and accept.
After a lifetime of service, he accepted that he had deluded himself as much as he had been deluded, and in that he was just a man like all others. So he faced the truth that mankind’s story could always be rewritten by those with the skill and determination to weave realities that other men would choose to believe. The day he retired, he felt nothing. It had been his life and now it was a kind of resource they had, in their own way, subverted for their own ends and whatever vision and story they could make real.
Curiosity breeds discovery. Discovery breeds purpose; visible in the opaque, invisible in our transparency.
“Motif détecté.”
Om tat sat. Om tat sat.
Her beauty was mutable. It progressed along the spectrum of their lives that wove the tangible with the intangible; that spun the visible from the unknown. Almost every day he learned something new about the nature of that beauty.
It was pregnancy that changed both of them. She became someone else. Someone and something greater than a woman or his wife. She embodied God and Nature, and the source and manifestation of creation. As her form changed, as she literally grew, so too did his sense of worldly joy and inner fear. It was his impending fatherhood that was the start of doubt and shifting priorities.
When he held her and Paul there in the delivery room, the Agency had begun to lose him. Neither he nor the Agency knew it at the time, but Paul was the beginning of the end.
Paul had listened enough to understand Thomas’ simplest message. When he decided to leave for Australia, Thomas was filled with relief.
“Go and be joyful. Live a pure and happy life. Seek honesty and truth in your companions. Look for love and beware of hatred in yourself and in others. I will help you. I can help you. I will always help you.”
“Motif détecté.”
Three memory keys granted access to their systems and interfaces. The nanoports implanted in the surface of their skulls provided a two-way connection; reading off neurological information was easier than transmitting meaningful information back in. Neural interfaces were the focus of constant programme development. They had all the data in the world stored in next to no space. Making use of it was the toughest of challenges but they had made steady progress. Interface upgrades were just becoming ready.
The gravity in the lab gently increased to its usual working level of 2.5. The lab’s plinths were set to 2 metres square, which was ample room to conduct the physical routines under the increased weight while the cerebral work was done within their OpFrame. Thomas and Harriett were stood, back-to-back, on their adjacent plinths in the centre of the entirely spherical lab. The lab’s Octoskin coating enabled its whole surface to display anything, which made for a 180 degree, hemispheric vista that filled their vision as they looked ahead from their plinths. In looking down to see the plinth, they would simply see whatever was displayed beyond it in that section of the vista. The system calculated what should be seen as if the plinth wasn’t there and displayed it on the plinth’s Octoskin with perfect geometry and focus. Harriett called Thomas into the OpFrame and they began their management workload.
Managerial oversight of the programme’s financial, asset and business operations was a critical task that took twelve hours per session under normal conditions. Even though Cassandra tracked, modelled, planned and integrated the vast majority of these essential operations, human oversight, understanding and permissions were always required before operations occurred in the real world. Cassandra was not allowed to directly operate there. Routine operations across the programme’s extensive network were long established but the programme delivered key operational briefings to its members from these managerial sessions that used Cassandra’s constant analysis and orchestration. Once decisions were made that needed to be implemented in a given programme entity, the programme members involved in it would be be consulted in MindSpace if they hadn’t been part of the planning. In their leadership roles as CEOs, Directors or owners, they would then drive those actions through their organisations as though they had originated at board level. In this way, the programme did not need anyone but its members at the highest levels of the companies and other bodies it had set up years before. Most employees were useful idiots and most programme members were leaders of their businesses or correctly place within institutions. The programme built businesses for its members and Cassandra handled almost everything about them so there was little real overhead for members. They simply had to know what was being done and how, then they had capacity to do programme work, think creatively and live life. The business of business and the business of laundering were integrated and automated to the maximum extent using the programme’s proprietary AI that was streets ahead of anything found elsewhere, and that also stole from everyone else’s technological work.
Melissa Amacher and Diego Aguardo were two programme members whose primary roles were institutional lead embeds. Melissa had overriding power in CERN and political clout outside of it. Diego’s primary role at CERN was deeply technical but he was a kind of backup and succession for Melissa. Between the two of them, they delivered fuel to the programme and exerted control over the facility. They also conducted intelligence operations on the other interests who had a hand in the site. Outside of their institutional roles, Melissa owned MAch, a scientific and political consultancy, and the Leonidas Foundation whose mission was to maximise the human experience through “multi-spectrum education, performance and excellence”. It was a version of the farms in Mexico: a way to find and invest in people of mixed background, overcome any practical obstacles they had in money or opportunity and push them mentally, intellectually and physically. This was a recruiting loop for the programme in the widest sense. Few people became programme members but many who benefited from what the foundation offered them were then employed in the myriad programme front companies in genuine and productive roles. Diego would soon choose what he wanted to lead - a technical company, a charity, whatever - and he would branch out in life backed by the programme’s standard operations. His was also an independent scientific consultant. The consultancies enabled them to do “work” for any of the programme’s entities and book fees, income, charges and so on, to play their role in the semi-artifice of its global operations that converted assets and money into better forms of humanity amongst anyone the programme determined could benefit. They were all ways of seeding something better into the human race.
In the lab, Thomas and Harriett scanned through reams of standardised data and readouts that showed performance of programme entities in a given territory. The readouts were complex, multi-axis and multi-dimensional graphs that tracked many managerial and operational characteristics that went beyond the usual C-Suite metrics. Accounting minutiae was not their concern; Cassandra took care of the numerical narratives reliably and it was for others to check those details. The complexity and surety of the relationships and dependencies between programme entities and non-programme entities were examined, and progression towards any programme goal was reviewed and controlled. There were a hundred of them in the OpFrame, all working the same data and tasks, like a hivemind and an executive conference in one. Most of the work was ritualised and routine but necessary to ensure that full control over the programme network was maintained.
The days of just covert money laundering operations had long gone. Thomas, James, Sal, Bart and Harriett had architected a massive blend of legitimate and illegitimate networks and entities across the globe that were managed and orchestrated by the programme to provide all the funding and various means by which to act. The job of overseeing that complexity was what engaged Thomas and Harriett in the lab. In the bandwidth of the OpFrame, connected to their colleagues around the world, with the system tools in the lab, they worked methodically through the programme’s structures on a continental, national and local basis.
Over the decades since Thomas, James, Sal and Bart had gone rogue in ‘68, they had made it their business to learn every trick in the book about how criminal, business and government enterprises acquired, used, moved and hid money, both in isolation and in concert. Much of what they learned was legitimate but esoteric. Many people running businesses across America simply didn’t know all the legal, creative room there was within the rules and the codes at state and federal level, and never would because they couldn’t afford the cost of the specialist advice. The extra special advice could not be bought. That was the preserve of the Agency, the FBI, and those considered to be their adversaries, although in truth they were all partners locked in deliberate, persistent symbiosis.
They first set up front companies in services and finance then diverted operational seed money from the Agency. Ostensibly it looked like kosher funding of small or experimental Agency operations, some of which connected to other branches of government and law enforcement. The money could be moved, diverted and lost through a variety of means, including the direct payment of fictitious agents and contacts that were poorly audited across not just the Agency but the whole of the FBI and law enforcement. Thomas had large scope through his exotic budgets to create accounting fictions around the work on not just Area 51 and S4, but SCANATE and other programmes that had all been running for years and accepted as both necessary and completely black. There was simply zero effective oversight of what was going on inside Thomas’ world. He simply had to avoid making things look ridiculous, and manage his own image and the perception of people around him. He did real work and he delivered real results but at the same time he did even more for himself.
At first and for many years, this took a huge amount of personal work that the four of them had no choice but to undertake themselves in secret. Outsourcing work was a straightforward way to get money out of the government, inflate the prices things really cost and grab hold of that money on the other side. That was exactly what Eisenhower had warned about, but the ones who listened and understood were the ones who got rich on a permanent basis. The programme was plugged straight into that philosophy. There was no other way to meaningfully compete because the flows of cash were so huge in the Military Industrial Complex. By ‘72, when SCANATE was outsourced, Thomas and his friends had established a robust set of fronts that could launder money adequately from the places they could steal it from and fed it off-shore where it built up to be redirected into markets around the world.
Bart was kept distant from the front companies and ran money into criminal networks through multi-agency anti-crime operations that he oversaw. In effect, he doctored the books of operations that sent money out to criminal informants and networks to literally skim and divert cash out of any law enforcement operation he was sure he could get away with. He also fed back information about operations, contacts and networks that helped the others in building and running the laundering operations. Bart’s position in Operation CHAOS straddled the FBI’s COINTELPRO and he instigated anti-corruption investigations to find bent agents, officers and employees inside government, as well as dissident networks, many of which were funded by subterfuge and conjoined. He did this to deliberately pervert those efforts and find people that he could use surreptitiously to further his friends’ true aims. It was dark and complicated work to set up. Bart turned many corrupt agents through blackmail, the surety of protection and the notional redemption of working for the right side. Around DC, Bart personally undertook covert work to establish the corrupt agents on protocols by which they would serve him. Bart always selected his targets and made initial contact in some kind of heavy disguise, posing as a Fed. He always gave the target Hobson’s choice: a government hole in the ground, an actual hole in the ground or a government-backed pension. Whether the target was a cop, Fed, some staffer somewhere or an undesirable, they always took the pension. It was an easy sell. Bart was 6’2” and he remained as strong and capable late in life as he had been in war. There wasn’t a target he picked who he couldn’t have killed barehanded. The war and his time in the Agency had taught him how to see the difference between a man’s front and his true capability. In the world of corrupt actors, most of the people he turned were mentally or ideologically weak and few were as dangerous as he was. That’s why he chose them. A fight is won by forcing all the odds in one’s favour upfront, rather than gaining the upper hand in the miserable moments of a desperate knife fight. He put his agents onto a payroll and they gave up occasional useful information about their own or others activities in whichever departments or groups they knew about. This gave Bart his own personal intelligence feed from the street that CHOAS and COINTELPRO didn’t have. Bart surreptitiously used some of this knowledge to direct official work towards or away from areas of interest. When payments were handed over to his agents, they were always larger than the agents’ agreed sums. The agents were committed to depositing the difference into various bank accounts without question or failure, and were also strongly instructed to send 30% of their “pay” into another account that was for their own good - their “pension” as it was known. They were given the protocol to follow and they never saw Bart again. The money and intel was exchanged by dead drop. If money ever failed to be deposited into the correct accounts, Bart would reveal the errant agent to anti-corruption teams and have them picked up and made to pay for their original infractions. Another option was to burn their identity to an enemy and have them taken out. None of the agents could try to use the “I was working for the Feds” excuse because there was no evidence and they would then have to admit to and explain all the cash they’d taken and stashed, which remained secret and separate from their original corrupt activities. Why make a two year stretch run to ten years? He made sure to occasionally throw small numbers of heads that he never recruited on the block so he got the results he had set out to deliver. It was easy to orchestrate a sting here and there to genuinely clean out a tiny pocket of corruption or occasionally get rid of a bad agent.
The private front companies were vehicles via which the money was grown through invented work and also in the financial markets through investments, trades and instruments. Off-shoring was a key tool that gave them protection through secrecy and anonymity. This was the easiest and fastest source of growth because within many fields, Thomas and his friends were the most optimally placed of inside traders. They had the ability to get the drop on every government contract inside and outside the US weeks if not months before they were finalised, as well as being able to acquire Agency level intel on national and international corporate activities and major political and military moves. This made “investing” easy to do, provided it looked normal enough. Commodity price movements could be anticipated in the medium term with 70% accuracy from what they knew. Portfolio and fund management was a key instrument that enabled their inside trades to look more like well-informed, analytical bets across a sector, theme or idea instead of targeted trades in a specific company or pre-known outcome. This was an extreme and large scale manifestation of what Washington was all about. Everyone in political circles understood that they traded in information before they did anything else in politics, and it was information that had the highest value and profit margins. The political class knew what was coming down the pipe and always had because they were the ones who created the shit and skimmed off the cream. Back then, not everyone was corrupt. Those who were weren’t all good at or focused on being very corrupt. But, over time, everyone learned more and more ways and those with power over the rules gave their friends more freedom to feed at the trough.
Within a few years it became obvious that tax consultancy and audit was the obvious choice of core, legitimate business to set up. The profit margins on work they’d already done across the US was huge. Tax consultancy was money laundering by other terms that provided direct access to the inner workings of and influence over companies they didn’t control, which fed their intelligence gathering.
Via Hall Associates, Harriett became a driving force behind the technological development of the programme’s future capabilities and the establishment of its global tax expertise. Inspired by Turing’s ideas around an artificial brain and already immersed in language and translation, she was innately aware of the possibilities that would flow from powerful computers able to parse and transform the fields of human knowledge. Computer understanding of human language was, in her mind, central. For a time, Harriett’s ideas far outstripped resources and general technical capabilities. Hall Associate’s Language, Linguistics and Translation Division (LLTD) served civilian and government markets and largely ran itself by mid ‘76. From the late seventies to the early eighties LLTD focussed on winning government linguistics and translation contracts to penetrate layers of the security services, acquire clearances for Hall Associates and build trustworthiness until it became integrated into the military security complex. Because LLTD was about language, its access to intel was expansive; it was a fundamental layer that joined the USA’s intelligence services to the rest of the world. People took it for granted and failed to pay attention to the power and access Harriett acquired.
In late ‘75, just a year after starting out, Harriett followed Thomas’ suggestion to ape the DARPA development cycle. Her major focus became the development of improved surveillance gear through the funding of combined research in material science and audiological technologies that she pursued under Hall’s AuTech Division (ATD). She initially invested $20,000 in the development of microphone technology and the combination of multi-mic arrays that had a civilian application in all manner of recording devices and government applications in surveillance. Her first foray resulted in improved compact condenser microphones that were smaller and more sensitive than those on the existing market. Harriett then experimented by combining them in multiple arrays to improve both their pick-up and noise reduction capabilities. She brought signals engineering into the picture and created the Synox1 that gave people working in surveillance easier ability to hone in on sounds they wanted to hear and filter out the ones they didn’t, all in a small box that was simple to operate. That got her onboard as a government supplier. All Harriett aimed to do was establish a product presence that the government accepted and bought to drive a significant revenue stream that she could reinvest elsewhere. Hall’s AuTech Division quickly grew through iterative product development cycles and the provision of suites of audio gear for surveillance, music recording, and component provision to consumer electronics markets. All of Hall Associate’s operations were completely legit and could pass the most sensitive of smell tests. What had brought Hall Associates and its sub divisions and increasing number of brands up so quickly was Harriett’s frightening capabilities and almost effortless but somewhat psychotic drive. She simply envisaged an outcome, mapped out contributing tasks and brutally executed them. Being perfect or right was irrelevant. She simply understood that it was the will to act that created progress. Results could be honed and improved along the way. Hall’s purity was key. It protected her and Thomas and made every other aspect of their subterfuge easier.
The moment Thomas saw Harriett’s serious work commence in ‘75, he began to plan ahead. Her efforts would require dedicated people who could be trusted and honed. In January ‘76 he approached Bukowski, Philips and Caron and began to prep them for their sponsored education. They were all naturally pre-disposed to scientific and technical fields of study, but Thomas pushed them as hard as he could.
“You’ll never get another opportunity like this. You’ll be employed to study, then you’ll be involved in leading work in science and technology,” he had told them. “Take on as much as you can manage.”
Each of them understood enough about the possibilities on offer and left S4 and the military behind them. They each undertook dual degrees. Bukowski chose physics, Philips chose microbiology and Caron opted for chemistry. Their second degrees were all in branches of computer science and mathematics. Thomas ensured that they secured places in solid institutions but the men’s dedication to their own futures meant that they didn’t need much further encouragement. Thomas gifted each of them the Hemi-Sync tapes as a study aid and a clandestine test of their wider potential abilities. He suspected that their exposure to Abra had conditioned them or demonstrated that they were fully capable of developing their abilities.
Beyond her work in audio technology and languages, Harriett’s real obsession was in human knowledge integration that harked back to Bletchley and Alan Turing. At first she envisaged the creation of an artificial brain that was capable of storing, understanding and integrating large parts of human knowledge in the hope that somehow the knowledge would become highly accessible to people via a machine that might also somehow identify or understand things that humans hadn’t.
In ‘76 Harriett set up two new companies, Brightwells and Knoveta. Brightwells was the programme’s first tax consultancy, that was as literal, boring and profitable as one might imagine. Knoveta was the start of the long, slow slog of trying to turn as much of the fields of maths, physics, chemistry and biology as possible into libraries of computer code that could be accessed and manipulated on the most powerful machines available. Knoveta was the point at which Harriett’s business started to turn gray. The investors and funding sources were technically suspect, but she maintained plausible deniability and Thomas’ creations had been around for several years and withstood onshore scrutiny. She kept all of Hall Associates’ operations well clear.
In the mid Seventies computing was still specialised, compartmentalised and expensive. Even the Cray supercomputers and equivalents were limited by memory, data storage, and read/write capabilities to the point that Harriett’s ambitions rapidly hit practical limits of money and computer resources. Luckily, she was married to an established money launderer. As a private company, Knoveta’s reporting was extremely limited and through it Harriett attracted investment funds from fronts that Thomas, James and Sal had established years before. With sufficient funding, Harriett employed a specialist team of computer programmers, mathematicians and scientists to programme the knowledge libraries that could be run on Cray supercomputers.
The first major stage of Harriett’s vision centred around a very human implementation of a very human idea: the distillation and integration of maths-based knowledge. Digitised libraries of subjects were built and loaded into a dedicated Cray 1 supercomputer. Each library was then honed in structure and content so that accessing the information was as fast and efficient as possible, while requiring the minimum storage space. Each library was analysed and compared with the others by a dedicated program called InGate, whose name was derived from the words interrogate, intelligence and gateway. InGate’s purpose was to spot duplications, overlaps, connections and relationships between any of the content in any of the libraries, map them and then rebuild each and all libraries in a more efficient way based on what it had identified.
This was a monumental task by the standards of the Seventies, so much so that Knoveta became Cray’s biggest and most secretive customer. When it quickly became clear that a single Cray 1 wasn’t up to the task, Harriett and her small team took inspiration from Mother Nature herself and bought four more machines. Each were nodes that housed a library in either maths, physics, chemistry or biology. The fifth machine was the nexus that ran InGate. Each node could talk to the nexus through a dedicated connection and performed two key functions: a subset of InGate code constantly analysed the node’s own library for efficiency opportunities within itself; it also then applied any restructuring or reprogramming that the nexus identified as a result of its work. The nexus was tasked with analysing and integrating all of the nodes’ libraries in a recursive, regressive and cross-node fashion. This setup of four library nodes around a single InGate nexus was Knoveta’s first “neuron cluster”. Each library node had some intelligence and a huge amount of data, while the central InGate node was where most of the integrative brainpower resided.
The cash required for the work was monumental. Each Cray 1 cost around $8m back then, which was equivalent to $33m in today’s money. Knoveta’s investors provided some investments, mainly covering operational costs, and some lines of credit that were used to service a constant line of credit with Cray. They also became purchasers and providers of hardware and premises. This kept huge lump sum payments off the books. Regardless, the work of such a small company was inordinately expensive but as a private company with vague relationships to the government and intelligence services, no one looked hard at the accounts. No revenue was generated nor profits made by an entity that was undertaking cutting edge commercial research and development but looked a lot smaller on paper than its ambition really was. Throughout their studies, Bukowski, Philips and Caron constantly interned at Knoveta, where they were put to work on the development of the libraries and InGate to contextualise their work and prepare them for their eventual futures. They came to understand the subjects of the libraries, the technical, computational architecture and the maths, and so they were equipped to eventually understand the system in totality. Thomas and Harriet prepared them to become stewards of the first artificial neuronal cluster.
In late ‘78, after two years of work by Knoveta’s small team of dedicated experts, the cluster contained much more efficient and inter-related libraries that could be interrogated quickly. The content had been merged and better integrated so that the divisions and duplications of each of the subjects had been radically reduced within their digital representations. Results delivered by the cluster spanned all relevant fields of knowledge within the libraries, which showed how base mathematical concepts or functions permeated each science, and where crossovers in scientific concepts existed. The cluster acted as a relational database across science and maths that was sophisticated for its time and also huge in its breadth of data access. Fundamental limits persisted around how much of physics, chemistry and biology could be expressed purely in mathematical terms. Since computers could not “understand” any other language, the cluster was not capable of finding meaningful links between non-mathematical areas of the libraries. However, it could pattern-match vocabulary and phrases, and perform superficial analysis that did not require natural language parsing or understanding, and this was all part of InGate’s powerful function. It was the work of humans to translate as much of the libraries into mathematical expressions as possible to give InGate more material to work on and ways to understand each subject field. Bukowski, Philips, Caron and the rest of the team spent more and more of their time on that kind of work once the cluster was established and InGate followed its programming to churn through the integration of the growing libraries.
Once Harriet’s work in Knoveta had taken on its early structure, Thomas, James, Sal, Bart and Harriett began to map out possible futures and where they wanted to be within them. Money was no longer an issue. Acquisition of resources and the manifestation of ideas and actions were the ongoing challenge. Hall Associates was the most focused and closely controlled means for any of them to act and, by making it a service provider to the intelligence community, Harriett had shrewdly put it in plain sight and the protection of the government.
“We’ll always be constrained by the amount of brainpower we have, how much our people can know, and the speed and scale we can act without a breach of confidentiality. That’s a huge brake on the development of our ideas,” Harriett mused as she and Thomas sat in the Knoveta management suite, on the third floor of a NY brownstone on East 10th Street. It was spring, 1978.
“You know, that’s exactly what I said about COATHANGER…” Thomas laughed “…for thirty years! Fortunately, now you and I have more options, doll. We just have to be creative and sensible about risk.”
“Well, you ended up using the private sector. Contractors… letting the big boys in on some of the secrets, making your Faustian pacts. We can’t necessarily do what you did because we aren’t the government. We can’t threaten, shut down, lock up or kill people who betray us. We have to be far more cunning."
They sat quietly, contemplating their situation. The management suite was actually a self-contained apartment in a building that was fully hardened and secured to counterintelligence standards. The apartment had a full board room and the lounge had a study office area for Harriett and another. The other floors were set up as offices and the basement levels housed some of the Knoveta labs. The original neuron cluster beavered away at the very bottom. On other subterranean levels, various experimental computer systems were in rapid development and prototyping. Three ex-Agency operators had been recruited by Cranforth to lead site security but they were part of a totally separate, burgeoning security company, Shaw Solutions. Compartmentalisation ensured that information risk was managed effectively. The only people who were fully in on what was going on inside and outside Knoveta was Thomas, Harriett, James, Sal and Bart Cranforth. Bukowski, Philips & Caron knew only about Knoveta’s immediate technical work but they could imagine its future significance. Their prior knowledge of S4 and Area 51 gave them broad context and tacit understanding that they were playing a key part in furtherance of at least the USA’s technical capabilities. Everyone else in Knoveta knew what they needed to know to do their work, which was done under strict contracts and decent remuneration. The whole place was, to Thomas and his compadrés, a testing and vetting ground for future recruitment. Most people would fail but they only needed a few gems here and there.
“Seeds… amazing and funny little things, aren’t they, my love?” Harriett was by the window boxes that she’d planted out with various kinds of marigolds. “All that power and potential in such tiny things. You barely need to do anything with them and they can become the most intricate, massive and strongest things in nature.”
“Or enchanting and special, like our willow tree.” Thomas smiled. “I’m in the mood for a cheeseboard and a glass of something.” He rose and went into the kitchen. Harriett spent the minutes alone watching patterns of the world pass by outside the windows and inspecting the varied perfection of her flowers. Thomas returned with a large wooden platter and two large glasses of white wine. Side-by-side they nibbled at their little feast that harked back to their hill in England.
“I think seeds could be an answer, but only if we can trust in human nature,” said Harriett.
“Hmm…” Thomas mulled the Pouilly Fumé’s nose. “Trust in human nature…?” He closed his eyes and sipped, savouring the wine’s flavour as it blended with then swept aside the joys of their cheeseboard. “You mean, put Chaos Theory to the test? What could possibly go wrong?”
“Depends on how much we seed.” She could tell he was running a million lines of code through his head as he quietly gathered another round of nibbles from the platter. Just as he was about to speak, she cut him off. “What’s the purpose of seeding? To get a similar outcome faster, or to get a different outcome over some or any timeframe, or to get myriad outcomes and diverse, rapid prototyping? All of those fruits come from a single seed eventually, if it’s planted in an open field. But… mutation is a fact of life with this seed and there’s no knowing what the end result will be. And of course, there is no end, only the continuum of history. Caveat emptor. How’d I do?”
He laughed quietly and his eyes sparkled warmly. “That’s nearly all of it. I just wonder as well where we plant this seed? If we want it to definitely grow, we could start it somewhere in the government greenhouse, close to us. Once it gets started, we could take cuttings as well and plant them out. What do you think?”
“Sounds sensible. What about the architecture?”
They embarked upon the outsourcing of Harriett’s work by breaking down her neuron cluster design into a much simpler, different architecture. If they seeded the idea of powerful clusters of supercomputers into the wider world, two outcomes were certain: almost no one would be able to afford to pursue the idea because of the cost and the zero returns, and over time any third party efforts would be likely to deliver results similar to and probably behind Knoveta’s own work. Instead, they inverted the design by simply making a large network of simple computers that could all do a modest amount of work while talking to at least several others at once. It was an easy-to-build, low unit cost and quick to implement architecture. Because it was a different approach, the outcome or evolution would be different to Knoveta’s work, even if the end capabilities might overlap. This architecture was arguably closer to the design of a human brain made of billions of simple neurons capable of many connections, than a cluster of very powerful nodes with only a few connections.
“Well doll, we can slip the idea into a few DARPA channels and see if there’s any traction. Present it as an evolution of secure telex machines at CIA outstations and embassies, for starters. Some nerd with a beard and spectacles will be desperate for a chance to make The Next Big Thing.”