The Fourteenth Protocol_A Thriller Read online

  “Dude,” came the lispy voice from the other side of Cade’s cube wall.

  “Hey, man.”

  “Did you see that instant messenger was down again?” Whitmore was Cade’s cube-neighbor. At five feet nothing, Whitmore could almost stand up and walk under his cube. He was an effeminate guy to say the least, but could be trusted with anything.

  “No. Hey, give me a chance to boot up will you? And by the way, what time do you get in here anyway? It’s like you never leave. Is that the same shirt you had on yesterday?”

  “Oh, go screw yourself.”

  “Well, you know you and I can’t function without instant messenger. I mean, we work four feet apart. God forbid we’d have to speak to one another instead of using IM.”

  “No way I’m talking to you, man.” Whitmore couldn’t contain the sarcasm that came so naturally. He was a real piece of work, as they say. He never seemed to be seen outside of the office. A hermit, but an office hermit; the kind of guy every company secretly loves to hire. Tireless, smart, never whines. The true team player. “Never fear. I’ll figure a way to fix that IM before the day is out.”

  Standing up and leaning over the cube wall, Cade said, “So how exactly does an art director fix the instant messenger software, anyway?”

  “Not your problem, my man. Not your problem.”

  Cade sat down, spun his chair into position, and started in on the day. His job was to project manage all upkeep and maintenance of the servers on the sixteenth floor. Eleven hundred and fifty-six servers, to be exact. The floor space rivaled that of a Wal-Mart.

  “That’s a lot of black boxes with blinky lights on them,” Cade would say as he entered the server room each day. No matter who was walking by as he said it, they’d always give him a look as if to say, What a nimrod. That was the fun of it. Know your shit inside and out, and you can act like an idiot. And Cade did know his stuff. At twenty-eight, he was by far the youngest admin in the company. He graduated just ahead of schedule from Georgia Tech and had gone straight into the work of managing e-mail servers. He didn’t care so much about the business of e-mail itself; it was just a gig he fell into while co-oping towards the end of undergrad. And why not? Thoughtstorm was growing like crazy despite a million know-it-alls predicting the end of e-mail due to the rise of social media. If e-mail was dying, all these blinky lights wouldn’t be going bonkers all day long firing out millions of e-mails.

  Even though Cade had been at Thoughtstorm six years, there was always one thing that bothered him. There was something wrong with the seventeenth floor. That floor was packed to the gills with servers as well. But you never seemed to meet anyone that worked on that floor. Not at lunchtime, the company Christmas party, on the elevator, nowhere. Hell, occasionally you’d meet someone from the company that you didn’t know at Good Old Days, the hole-in-the-wall bar across the street. But, even then, they never worked on seventeen.

  The Buckhead area was the epicenter of nightlife in Atlanta. And after all, even server geeks go out once in a while. Thoughtstorm employees packed the place after work on Fridays because you could just walk across the street. Well, that and the fact that if you got there before six p.m., the pitchers were half price. The place was hopping.

  But no one from the seventeenth floor, never. The more Cade thought about it, the more he realized how odd this was. He worked one floor below, yet never met anyone from there. Stranger still, there had to be a group of server dudes up there just like him, all operating black, blinky boxes, yet you never saw them. What the hell is that all about? thought Cade. Do they have their own sneaky elevator or something? At any rate, it wasn’t a mystery Cade was going to solve today. Not before he waded through all the e-mails in his inbox anyway. Cade had to admit, he might get paid a lot to control servers that sent massive amounts of e-mail, but he hated an inbox full of the damn things.

  Cade culled his inbox. Not that any of these were spam, mind you. The company ensured spam didn’t make it past the front door. No, most of the stuff that he deleted was typical corporate hoo-ha. Training opportunities, the hours the building would be open during the MLK holiday, updates to the employee privacy policy, and when the refrigerators would be cleaned out. Unfortunately though, Cade’s inbox was always full of e-mails that were action items. There was always something to do.

  Cade was supposed to make it out onto the server room floor by nine thirty each morning to make his rounds. It was not a bad idea actually. Sometimes being up close and personal to the machines gave you a better sense of what was going on with them and what they were thinking. However, he could just as easily monitor them from his desk on three wide-screen monitors. Cade opened his server monitoring software and gave a quick look across all his monitors to make sure he didn’t see anything with the color red. Red was the color of bad. Red meant his phone was about to ring as some server box entered a problem state such as an overload. His grandma would have called it a “conniption.” No red meant no server conniptions today.

  The servers were grouped together in what Thoughtstorm called “pods.” The pods all had boring names like “ACA” or “DRT” to identify them during times of trouble. Most pods played host to over fifty customers at a time. But one, pod GSV, held just a single customer. GSV stood for Government Services and was located on the seventeenth floor.

  Although it had taken a long time to build up the trust required, Cade could see the health of all servers in the building. The GSV pod was showing yellow. Cade noticed the pod appeared to be pushing out a huge volume of e-mails at the moment. The yellow would soon die down and turn soft green once the sending job was done. Why in the hell does a government agency need to send that much e-mail? thought Cade.

  Most of the time, Cade had access to all data on the servers, which meant he could also see things like the list of e-mail recipients and even the content of e-mails they were sending. Not that the content was all that interesting. Most of the time, it was just a company sending out a boring e-mail newsletter to its customers.

  But there was one exception. The GSV pod was blocked. Cade could only see the server health screens for that pod. What the hell is on that pod that makes it so special? And just how trusted does a guy have to be before they’ll open up that access? What do they think I’m going to do, steal the data? Cade mused. He’d never done anything like that in his life. And after all, if that server cluster ever had any real difficulty and started to redline, crap out, get flummoxed, or choke whilst uttering gurgling noises, somebody would be calling on good old Cade to look into the problem. But without access to the whole thing, that would be impossible. Not my problem, he thought. And even if they ever did call him to help out with that pod, he’d have to get some new permissions on his keycard. His keycard wouldn’t let him on the seventeenth floor, much less out into the server room. The likelihood was that that pod was locked off behind some metal mesh cages anyway and security officers would hover nearby.

  The yellow slowly changed back to green on pod GSV, and all was once again well with the world. Cade spent a bunch of time in a planning meeting that day. Thoughtstorm was expanding the available server rack space at the headquarters building but was also opening up a new data center in Germany. Too many of Thoughtstorm’s European customers had been complaining that sending their e-mail data to the United States violated European Union privacy regulations.

  Cade grabbed a Caffè Americano coffee in the cafeteria downstairs, which was a lot easier than exiting the building and fighting through all that security again. Back at his desk, he rubbed tired eyes and put his hand on his mouse. The three computer monitors glowed to life. Cade was surprised to find pod GSV in the yellow once again. This time it was closer towards redline than it had been in the morning. He focused on the screen and looked at the server readings. Something was definitely wrong. How much e-mail volume are they sending up there? My God, he thought. Normally, if a customer sends this much e-mail, the company adds more servers onto the pod, thereby spreading
out the load. But that hadn’t been done in this case.

  He was just about to go back to his own work, figuring someone on seventeen who actually has ACCESS will handle it, when the iPhone buzzed in his pocket. The ringtone that accompanied the phone’s vibration was only used when a server text alert was sent. That didn’t happen often, but when it did, it meant that you drop whatever crap you were working on. This was the not-so-fun part of Cade’s job—even if he was at home, sleeping like a big baby, having been rejected by another girl on a Saturday night, he had to get up and come to the office.

  He looked at his pocket as if there might be a tarantula in there. An alert? For a yellow server? he thought. He already knew what the alert was about but had never been alerted to trouble on that pod before. Hell, he had never been alerted to trouble on the seventeenth floor before. When he read the text, his shoulders slumped and his eyes shut. He hated this. The text said “Alert: EMERGENCY CODE RED. Server cluster GSV. 13:23 HRS EST.” Cade had but a single pet peeve. It was use of the word “emergency” in a business setting. Cade’s father narrowly survived Vietnam and knew the true meaning of the word. He never allowed anyone in the house to so much as utter it unless someone was bleeding. We send e-mails, for God’s sake, thought Cade. There are no emergencies in e-mail. No one is bleeding.

  Cade’s dad had been a right-seat pilot in a Navy EA-6B Prowler, a kind of jamming plane used to screw up the enemy’s radar. His dad was the technical type and not a warrior so sitting right-seat in a “box of electronics with wings” had suited him just fine. But it was one dark-skied night in January 1971, where Cade’s dad learned firsthand what the word “emergency” was really used for. A SAM missile had zipped off the jungle floor five thousand feet below and snaked across the sky when it clipped the portside engine. Cade’s dad had a hard time telling that story. He would avert his eyes as he recalled his best friend, Dan Tarlton, yelling into the mic, “Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Voodoo Zero One Niner declaring an emergency . . .” The story always stopped right there. His father just couldn’t relive it. It was like pouring salt on a raw wound. There were four men in the plane on that night in January. Three of them lived long enough to see their parachutes deploy, but Cade’s father, Cal Williams, was the only one to sneak out of the jungle alive.

  3

  “You can’t see America from the interstate,” Alyssa McTee’s mom would always say. From the time Alyssa left Atlanta, she glued herself to the rural roads and vowed to never use the highway. She pushed the thick-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of her nose and touched the play button on her phone tucked inside the docking station in the VW Beetle. Another Indigo Girls song harmonized across the car speakers as her fingers tapped in rhythm. She shifted in her seat to adjust the frumpy dress. Most girls her age were wearing tight-fitting skirts, but Alyssa never seemed to show any interest. Not that she had anything to hide in those loose-fitting dresses. Actually, she was quite trim. Although, according to her, no one would notice it. Lifeless hair drifted across her forehead. She tucked it back behind her ear and glanced in the rearview mirror only to see an image of her mom staring back at her. Having reached her early twenties, Alyssa now knew she really did look like her mother at this age. In fact, Alyssa had looked like her mom at all ages. The likeness was in the blue eyes and straight hair. There was a photo from 1969 of her mom, dressed in true Woodstock attire at the age of six. The long straight hair, little leather bandana, and bell-bottom jeans truly captured the era. The resemblance was striking.

  Alyssa needed this vacation. Work had been pressure-filled the past few months, and she needed to get out of there and go see something—something different. And she needed to be alone for a while too.

  Never one to speak up at meetings, she more or less followed the crowd, except in the way she dressed. Her normal attire hid her figure and probably hadn’t exactly helped in the guy department. Still, this trip had been good for her wandering spirit—a spirit inside her that she attributed to her mom. Sitting in that cubicle at work didn’t exactly capture the essence of a free spirit on the open road. Her mom never said so directly, but Alyssa knew that deep inside her mother, there was something wanting to come out. Her mom had somehow lost herself along the way through life. Alyssa was determined that wasn’t going to happen to her. She wasn’t going to look back and wish she had done something really great with her life. Regrets are the food of conformers, she thought, and she didn’t like regrets.

  Wandering the rural roads through the southeast had been her outlet. Her obsession for funky coffee shops had inadvertently created an odyssey of sorts. Alyssa’s first idea was to drive—simply drive. Go out and see something of the country. Wind her way into small towns, find the town square, eat at a little corner diner, see if there were actually any waitresses named Flo, and maybe make just one friend along the way.

  Then the trip kind of took on a life of its own. She had stopped in what she thought was the coolest little mom-and-pop coffeehouse she’d ever seen. It was a little place not far from Helen, Georgia, on her way out of the state. It was called simply Sweetwater Coffeehouse, and sweet it was. Soft velour couches, rustic planks on the floor, and an aroma, something reminiscent of hickory-smoked barbeque folded into roasted coffee. Apparently the guy in the shop next door made the pottery mugs himself. Real local charm with not even a hint of tourist-ish-ness. And better still, not a hint of corporate. Alyssa had done something there she normally wouldn’t. She had ordered a scone.

  “What the hell is a scone anyway?” she asked the barista. This pastry looked nothing like the scone-things she’d seen at the big chain coffee shops in town. No, this was homemade, fluffy deliciousness.

  Alyssa looked around at the place as if to check if anyone was watching her. She was on her own. For the first time in her life, she was on her own. It made her feel so at peace, so in charge of herself. A candle lit inside her, and the delicate smoke that wafted off of it was pride.

  It occurred to her that she hadn’t even thought of work since she left her apartment near Little Five Points in Atlanta. In that coffeehouse, a few things changed for Alyssa. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something settled inside her. She felt like she knew who she was. She thought about that picture of her mom. Her mom would be so proud of her right now. She was on an odyssey. Her mom would have never had the nerve to do this, not after she got married anyway.

  Alyssa knew this would be a trip she’d never forget. She’d go out and find the country. Literally find the people of the country. Find her roots. And maybe find just a little bit of herself that she thought was lost. Somewhere in the untapped subculture hidden within the coffeehouses of this country, she’d make peace with herself.

  And she would discover more than that along the way. One thing struck her as funny. Unlike all the coffeehouses she had been to in Atlanta, the baristas in this one, near North Georgia’s Sautee Valley, didn’t have even a single body piercing or visible tattoo.

  “I guess it’s hard to find true grunge in the North Georgia mountains,” she said.

  Alyssa took the last sip of coffee goodness. She glanced over at the stone fireplace. Man, it would be so nice to curl up here on this couch on a freezing day in front of the fire. She took one last glance around, swearing to memorize the scene. A small poster clung to the old stone mantel. There was something so relaxed about its design and the way the fonts and colors drew your attention.

  Tammy Lynn’s Bluegrass Pickin’ Party and Hog Roast

  — Pineville, Kentucky.

  If you’re looking for authentic Kentucky flavor and tradition, head to the mountains at the height of bluegrass season and enjoy America’s finest bluegrass festival and hog roast!

  Alyssa stared at the poster a minute. This was America. If you wanted to meet the people, you had to be where they worked and lived.

  Maybe it was the caffeine talking, but she stood up with a new resoluteness. She was sick of being scared, sick of being shy, and sick an
d tired of being sick and tired. She wasn’t going to live the same demure, quiet, proper existence she had always known.

  Alyssa walked out the swinging wooden door and got into her car. When she put the key in the door, she realized it—she hadn’t locked the car door when she pulled up to this place. To Alyssa, not locking the car door was akin to walking into a coffeehouse and ordering some fluffy, fat-laden coffee flavored with pumpkin-mango-spice, crème-hazelnut, froth-de-blah-blah. You just didn’t do it. She smiled. Not locking the car door was a strange experience for her. Never did she remember not locking a car door in Atlanta. The Little Five Points area where she lived was like a haven for car-pilfering thugs who mixed in with the peace-loving, hippie crowd. Nonetheless, she hadn’t realized when she pulled up to this little place, way out here in the North Georgia mountains, that a comfort level like that would drape across her. It felt like a warm blanket soaked with safety, confidence.

  She backed out and glanced down at the map on her smartphone. Thinking better of it, she put the map down. It’s not an adventure with too much of a plan. No plans, no agenda, no schedule. Just discovery, she thought. That bluegrass festival might be nice though. About the only thing she knew was that she’d weave her way north, glued to the back roads.