ATLANTIS

Who is the spy?

CHAPTER SEVEN 

“Any idea who the spy is?” Ariana asked in a low voice. Ingram had been deciphering data for over an hour. 

“No,” he said. “Once it hits the GPS satellite, the signal goes everywhere. Anyone with a GPR anywhere on the planet can receive it if they know what to look for.” 

“What about the message? Wouldn't that make our data accessible to everyone?” 

“Like I said, someone's got to look for the piggyback. And then the data's encoded. It would be gibberish to anyone else who doesn't know the code or the original data to match against the code. That's the only way I was able to figure it out. It's a really smart method.” 

“Any ideas?” 

“Most likely Hie-Tech,” Ingram said. “They've got the technology and they've got the money to get access to the GPS transmitter.” 

“Great,” Ariana muttered. “Just what we need. Could Hie-Tech have sabotaged the flight?” 

Ingram shook his head. “That wouldn't be too smart if they had a spy on board. I'd assume they'd want their spy back. Plus they have nothing to gain by sabotaging us this way. They would want the data as much as we did. Remember, we went down before we were directly over the target area.” He held up a disk. “We got maybe twenty-five percent of what we wanted.” 

Ariana took the disk and slipped it into the vest pocket of her shirt. “Maybe the spy screwed up. Hie-Tech wanted the data but they wouldn’t want us to get the data. Maybe the spy cut it too close.” 

They both looked down the body of the plane at the other members at their stations, illuminated by the dim red glow of the emergency lights, the glare of their computer screens and the golden glow emanating from the vicinity of Argus’s mainframe. 

“The spy could be dead,” Ingram noted. 

“Could be, but we don't know,” Ariana replied. “Any idea who'd have the expertise to do this type of messaging and encoding on our end?” 

“Anyone with the proper training,” Ingram said. “And anyone who has access to the main computer could have put the message in.” 

“Damn,” Ariana muttered. “That’s everyone.” 

“They must have paid someone off at the NSA to get their messages piggybacked on the GPS signal,” Ingram noted. 

“They could afford it,” Ariana said. “We paid forty million for this gear and several million in bribes to get it here. They could afford to spend quite a bit to steal our data after we do all the work.” 

“Don't you think we have bigger problems right now,” Ingram gently suggested, looking back where Carpenter was watching the golden beam infiltrate more of Argus's hardware, “than figuring out who the spy is?” 

Ariana didn't say anything in reply, which was her only acknowledgment that he was right. She would deal with the spy issue once they were out of here. 

“Do you have any clue what that could be?” she asked Ingram, pointing back at Argus. 

He sighed. “Based on what I can see it seems to be pure energy in the form of an atomic laser.” 

“Atomic laser?” Ariana asked. 

“An optical laser operates by emitting photons, which have no mass and move at the speed of light,” Ingram explained. “An atomic lasers emits atoms, which not only have mass, but also have a wavelike nature. I know that there are some people who have been experimenting with such things as part of a super-computing system, but nothing I've heard of is beyond the theory stage.”